5 Jan
2017
5 Jan
'17
9 a.m.
Quoting Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com>:
On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:50:27PM -0500, William
Pechter wrote:
My understanding which was that of an interested layman in 1991 and just bitten by the
bug, and based
upon the comments of some of the computer science staff of the U of Canterbury, NZ, at
that time, is
that 386BSD held everybody's attention. (I mentioned in 1992 reading about Linux in a
computer mag
to one of them and he told me 386BSD was where the action was.) i80386 PCs were relatively
cheap,
BSD was (relatively) free from AT&T's legal claims, and 386BSD was even freer and
targeted that cheap
powerhorse. My guess is that if Sun had spun off a Free SunOS, it would've been
ported to the 386.
What would've happened then is anyone's guess.
Wesley Parish
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
Where would the current FreeBSD be if you
compared it with SunOS4?
That's a good, and hard question. One of the nice things about SunOS4
was the VM system and the VFS layer and the VNODE layer. Those were
really well thought out. They all, so far as I know, were Bill Joy
dreams, but Steve Kleiman was the primary driver of the vnode design
but I think Joe Moran was the main coder of all of that. It's one of
those things that people copy but don't get right. I think Linux got
closer than FreeBSD did.
I haven't dug into the FreeBSD kernel in years so who knows, maybe
it is fantastic. When I last looked it was lagging way behind SunOS
(which isn't fair, Sun was a business and as such had buildings full of
motivated people who were making it better. There was a building with
just networking people in, we're talking a two story building with I
dunno, ~100 offices). They threw more resources at it that FreeBSD has
ever had.
If you took the ~1992 SunOS and stacked it up against the 2016 FreeBSD,
well I would hope that FreeBSD would be better but I wouldn't bet on it
across the board. It would certainly have more drivers (and if we're
being honest, that's 99% of the work, all this generic kernel stuff
is super fun to talk about but all the real coding is in the drivers).
I think the more interesting question is would {Free,Net,Open}BSD even
exist if there had been a Free SunOS. I'm 100% convinced the answer
to that is a resounding no.