On Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 10:23:28PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: That might have been the Greg Limes release. I may be all wrong but someone, I think it was Greg, busted their ass to try and make SunOS 4.x scale up on SMP machines. There were a lot of us at the time that hated the SVr4 thing, it was such a huge step backwards. I dunno how much you care about Sun history, but SunOS, the BSD based stuff before 5.0, the engineers and the customers *loved* it. I was not the first guy who worked until midnight on that OS, I wasn't even on the radar screen. Guy Harris worked on it, tons of people worked on it, tons of people poured their heart and soul into it. It crushed us when they went to SVr4, that shit sucked. My boss, Ken Okin, paid me for 6 months to go fight management to stop the switch to SVr4. It was more than a decade later that I learned that the reason for the switch was that Sun was out of money and AT&T bought $200M of Sun stock at 35% over market but the deal was no more SunOS, it had to be SVr4. I really wonder what the world would look like right now if Sun had open sourced SunOS 4.x and put energy behind it. I wrote a paper about it, I still wonder. http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/srcos.html

Larry, had Sun open sourced SunOS, as you fought so hard to make happen, Linux might not have happened as it did. SunOS was really good. Chalk up another win for ATT! OTOH, I bet Sun would have done a CDL type license, which would have made it all pointless. To this day, I run into problems talking ZFS to people, entirely because of the CDL. ron

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 8:31 AM Joerg Schilling <schily(a)schily.net> wrote: too little, years too late, with a license few (including me) really felt comfortable with. Larry IIRC was pushing for a basic BSD license. I don't know if any of us really understood the full implications of the GPL for kernels back then -- both positive and negative.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 05:57:33PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: Huh? First of all, Sun employees don't have a contract, they are (or were) at will employees. So I think you mean they would quit if it were BSD licensed. Second, I've _never_ heard a single Sun person say they would quit if Sun open sourced something under the BSD license. I'm sure I've heard someone say they didn't like that license but never heard anyone giving up their job over it.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 06:11:20PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: "this fact" being that "many" Sun employees were prepared to quit if Solaris was BSD licensed? I'd like to see a list of those people, I find it extremely hard to believe, but data will change my opinion.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 06:40:07PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: You're the guy making the claim, onus is on you to back it up. That's how things work.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 06:48:06PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: Yeah, read the whole thing. Still looking for a list of Sun employees who were willing to quit if Sun chose the BSD license. What video?

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 1:24 PM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: Oops, I'm sorry, I meant Debconf 20*0*6, not 2016. - Dan C.

schily(a)schily.net (Joerg Schilling) wrote: I just discovered the name again: The lady that was in the teleconference has been Claire Giordano. Jörg -- EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is strange, I have in mind that Simon said BSD was not wanted by the programmers and GPL was not practical because Sun then could not give away binaries from Closed Source parts from other code owners that are in Sun Solaris but could not be in OpenSolaris. IIRC, the only thing I did get from that video is the confirmation that Simon was extremely unhappy with Danese claiming that Sun did like to have something that is deliberately incompatible to the GPL. My discussion with Andrew Tucker resulted in getting to know that while there have been _some_ people inside Sun that would like to go this way, it was not what Sun as a whole intended. I also remember that I got my recollection on the BSD thing from a face to face discssion with Simon and not from this video. So one of the statements from Simon may have been mistaken. What I definitely remember from a private discussion with Simon is that Danese was very unhappy that Sun did not chose GPL and she did never understand why this was not possible for a product like Sun Solaris that should have allowed to be combined with closed source parts from other vendors as done before. She left Sun soon after the CDDL was chosen and started to spread her view in a way that unfortunately harmed OpenSolaris. Jörg -- EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

On Thu, 5 Jan 2017, Larry McVoy wrote: "GPL: Free like VD" Personally, I'm fine with LGPL 2.1, but I rather quickly soured on the GPL proper, and what little code I've done recently has been under a modified BSD licence (UIUC licence). -uso.

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 8:57 AM Joerg Schilling <schily(a)schily.net> wrote: I am glad you are happy with the license. Somebody had to be :-)

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 05:31:09PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: I was in the kernel group at Sun at the time. The pictures I posted are of the guy that did the bring up. In no way was SVr4 even remotely derived from the SunOS 4.0 kernel. The only relation the two had was that both were derived from the original Unix sources but by this time they had diverged so much there was very little in common. Very little. There was good reason for all the SunOS people being butt hurt, Scooter threw out a lot of very hard work that he wasn't smart enough to value. I get the $200M part, he didn't get the value part.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 06:02:51PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: I'm not sure how you have legal access to the SunOS 4.x code. I'd love a copy of that source but so far as I know it's locked up. Sure it's similar. The process was: untar the SVr4 code take anything useful from the SunOS code try and make it compat If you want to call that derived from that's your call. In my mind "derived from" would mean start with the SunOS code and make it SVr4 compat. That is *not* what AT&T paid $200M to have happen. They knew that System V was a non-starter and they wanted all the SunOS goodness in System V.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 06:39:25PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: Apparently your ethics and my ethics differ. It was Sun's property, not mine. Huh, interesting. I'll check that out. Both Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore have worked for me. Bonwick was one of my students at Stanford and I hired him into the kernel group. Bill worked for me on BitKeeper. I'll let you know what they say. I think we can stop here. The rest of the world at the time described SunOS as "a bug fixed BSD". The mmap() interface was designed by Bill Joy while at UCB and was documented but not implemented in 4.2 BSD [*] To say that SunOS 4.x wasn't BSD based is ludicrous. And that's coming from the guy who made it conform to POSIX and in the process wrote lint libraries for SunOS, BSD, Posix, and System V. You're arguing with someone who was in the kernel group at Sun at the time and is close friends with the guy who did the bringup. I'm not sure you could get a better source but if you want to keep pushing your version of history I'll be here to point out where you get it wrong. [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmap Though that wiki page is suspect, did 4.3BSD-Reno really have the Mach VM system?

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:23:12PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: You got that right. Bill did no such thing. The rewrite was by Joe Moran. You're spouting a lot of misinformation and it's getting old.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:23:12PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: Sure. Here's some notes I put together for Eli Lamb when I was thinking about moving to Dec (to work for Jim Gray). The date on the file is 1992 so I had been there about 4 years. I was in the kernel group from 1988 to about 1992, then moved over to hardware where I did a cluster based NFS server and LMbench. Then I went to SGI and did a new name server that could serve all of California on a 200 mhz server, made NFS deliver serve up files at 60MB/sec per file (we could do as many streams in parallel as we had network cards). --lm I showed up in October 1988. This is what I can remember that I've done since I've been here. When I interviewed at DEC, their HR people thought I was lieing and I went through two more interviews before they finally believed me. * Doubled file system throughput. Publication. Generated sales. Talk to Steve Kleiman for confirmation. * Single handly implemented POSIX conformance in the 4.x OS. Bullet item on lots of sales. Talk to Don Cragun for confirmation. * Implemented smoosh - basis for Avocet and nselite. Talk to Shannon for confirmation. * Implemented nselite - almost *all* kernel devlopment on 5.0 and 4.x is currently under nselite. Nselite has saved manyears of time (see Karl Danz and Larry Bassel for mgmt confirmation; Len Brown & Roger Faulkner for engineering confirmation; I also have statistics of usage: nselite is more widely used than the NSE or Avocet). * VM, swap, tmpfs performance. I improved tmpfs write rates from 300KB to 7MB / second. Talk to Howard Chartok, Steve Kleiman, Peter Snyder for confirmation. * STREAMS, tty enhancements. Done under POSIX but had nothing to do with POSIX. * Porting tools for SunOS 4.x to any known Unix implementation. Talk to Rob Gingell for confirmation. * More fires in the kernel than I care to think about. I can run through bug traq to find these, many are boring, but all consumed substantial time. I have somewhat of a reputation of a kernel hack largely because of these firedrills. * Designed and built the first Sun clustered system, Sunbox. Hired and managed a team. * Taught two Quarters of Graduate level OS at Stanford while working full time at Sun. TA-ed the same course before that, Stanford ask me to teach it when Bob Hagmann retired. * Extensive consulting with other groups: - Lisp people, VM issues, Cris Perdue. - Fortran crowd, I/O issues, Robert Corbett. - SWSMON - kernel tuning, Anh Nuygun. - Dragon crowd I/O issues, SCSI performance, Jean-Marc Frailong. - Pluto people picked up many of the ideas in the SCSI card proposal, Dave Banks. - Avocet crowd is picking up all the positive ideas in nselite due to my team player efforts with them. Talk to Marla and Giordano for confirmation. - Okins group, SunBox, Okin for confirmation. - Mike Scott, HA NFS. - Disk performance, Rich Clewett. - Performance benchmarking, etc, Nhan Chu & group. - Big memory systems, Bill Peterson. - NFS group, performance, cache consistency, John Corbin. - UFS crowd, delayed I/O, quickcheck, Tom Wong, Blake Lewis. - SMCC, presto, omni, SCSI.

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 12:50:18PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: That's not true, Sunbox was all 5.x code. I spent about 3 years in the 5.x source base. You've been arguing with a guy who was in the kernel group and I've tried to set you straight and you just keep coming back with misinformation. The VM system was ported from SunOS 4.x to System 5. Your statements that SVr4 is based on SunOS are flat out wrong. SVr4 got a lot of SunOS goodness but the starting point was ATT System V. Yup, that Shannon. The fact that Glenn didn't put me on that patent is a sore point. Yes, he wrote the lisp code that showed it could be done. I wrote the C code that did that in one pass (his stuff was N+M where N was how many deltas were on the local side and M was how deltas were on the remote side). --lm

On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 02:40:08PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: Oh, brother. Let it go. I talked to the guy who did the bringup, did I not post that? It starts "SVr4 was not based on SunOS, although it incorporated many of the best features of SunOS 4.x". I'm dealing with trees down and landslides, I'll post the rest later, but Joerg you are just wrong about this.

On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 7:58 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: All the Sun guys I knew at Solbourne went on to work at the Broomfield location at Interlocken. They mostly worked on file system things. There was a Boulder office that did a port to the Sun Roadrunner, a 386 box that ran SunOS 4.0 and friends. They did other stuff there too before they were moved to the Broomfield office in a consolidation of different groups at sun. I'm pretty sure that it would be a huge stretch to say that the sysvr4 porting was done here, but it was a big office and maybe a few people were tangentially related to that effort. There were also some guys in Colorado Springs as well that moved up to Broomfield. The only big AT&T presence in town at the time was the buildings that would be spun off into Lucent a few years later... I'd have to agree with Larry on this point: I doubt that it was done in the Denver metro area. Btw, I've lived in Denver since I graduated college and went to work for Solbourne Computer in 1990. For a while, Sun was making Solbourne compatible computers... That's got me beat. I just had access to SunOS and Solaris... Plus various Solaris driver works over the years. And it was clear that Solaris had huge influx of code from SunOS, but it was equally clear that it was still old-school AT&T Unix from the layout of the sources. It didn't adopt many of the BSDish things, but opted for the older file placement and such. SunOS was quite a bit similar to 4.3 net2 BSD that FreeBSD started out on in lots of ways. Not so Solaris. But I've only been a FreeBSD committer for the past 25 years or so, so what do I know. I will admit that the last time I looked at the SunOS sources was in the early 1990's though. ZFS adopted to the SysVr4 layout, and so its port to FreeBSD also has the funky layout that had to be preserved and carefully hacked into place in FreeBSD... Warner

Quoting Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt;: <snip> <snip> Seconded. I'd love to get my hands on it as well. When I let my fascination with computers derail my BA(Classics) in 1991, I was told the OS choices included Unix - BSD naturally - but only if I could pony up a king's ransom to pay for an unused AT&T license. I wanted Sun because of the cool factor, but couldn't afford a workstation so I went with a PC, and the cost of downloading Linux or 386BSD correlated to the cost of floppies, and Linux was marginally cheaper, so Linux won. My copy of SLS is now on the Bochs images page. I found a Sun 68000 pizza box at a computer recycling place in 2002, but the cool had evaporated by then. But I'd still like to get my hands on the SunOS source. Who should we contact? 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

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:56 AM, Nevin Liber &lt;nevin(a)eviloverlord.com&gt; wrote: I don't think so. Solbourne had a OS/MP based on 4.1.3 (I think OS/MP 4.1C) and another based on 4.1.3u1 (OS/MP 4.1D), but there was never an OS/MP 4.1E. This only group I'm aware of was the Solbourne Kernel team that produced a ASMP version based on 4.0 and hired David Barak to make it SMP for the OS/MP 4.1 based on SunOS 4.1. It scaled to about 16 CPUs, IIRC, based on Solbourne's own MP designs. I worked at Solbourne at the time in the other interesting technology to come out of Solbourne (the OI GUI toolkit, which has become at best a historical footnote). Warner

Nevin Liber &lt;nevin(a)eviloverlord.com&gt; writes: [snip] [snip] A small addition.. there was a 4.1.4, a.k.a. Solaris 1.1.2 [I think] that made it out the door [Google around for references]. I remember having the cd and installing it. I also remember 4.1.3_U1, but not U2 or U3, but I wouldn't be suprised that they existed. I was at AT&T at the time and the group I was in resisted going to Solaris 2.x for as long as we could. We were mostly interested in desktop and small server stuff, so SMP need not apply and Solaris 2.x where x <= 4 was painful. I remember the Sparc 5 Model 170 with SunOS 4.x which ran, for us, just as well as the Ultra 1. Fun times.... -- Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS http://anduin.eldar.org - & - http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]

Brad Spencer wrote: I was keeping a group at Lucent running on some creaky Sparcstation2's used as the department servers (we probably had the worst collection of hardware in Lucent, but it was paid for and fully depreciated...) I had to do the Y2k patches on the boxes and the corporate types were pushing us to do weekly updates. Patches dribbled out over a couple of months requiring repeated passes over the hardware in a maintenance window. Ugh. I wrote a patch script and update cd and tape and applied the tar to all the Sun machines the night before y2k -- avoiding the repeated patching they (corporate IT) were requiring. Of course most departments just dumped the old hardware and updated to non-antiques. The windows boxes were another nightmare. After doing all of this I heard from an AT&T Manager that Lucent had a product update tape they sold to AT&T that did all the Y2k patches for one of their Sparcstation2 products. Too bad this wasn't available in-house. Anyone archive the y2k patches for SunOS 4.1.3_U1 and 4.1.4. I lost my fixes in a move and I'd like to bring a couple of the Sparcstations up again for fun. I really liked that OS and hated patching the libc for the resolver+ fixes. I think the main patches were for the date command, ms macros and some stuff like diag reporting. Realistically the Unix boxes were the easiest to deal with. Most y2k stuff was in application programs. If I still have the Sparc2 booting in 2038 it will be interesting. Bill

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 11:36:27AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: Not really. FreeBSD is open source and was way way behind SunOS. That's why so many Sun engineers were hugely butthurt when they were forced onto a far inferior System V source base. Scooter just didn't understand how much polish had gone into SunOS 4.x. It was a very talented group of engineers, many of whom had no social life (he says looking in the mirror :) so they poured all their energy into making SunOS great. I'm biased because I worked there, but I've run code on all of the major Unix offerings (AIX, IRIX, Ultrex, HP-UX and SunOS) and SunOS was hands down a better experience, inside the kernel, as a user of the syscalls, and in user space. It's what a geeky engineer would want with the polish needed to allow customers to have a good experience. I think a free SunOS would have had a cult following. I'd still be working on it. Sun's management just didn't realize what they were throwing away. Whimper.

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 07:50:27PM -0500, William Pechter wrote: 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.

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 04:00:06PM +1300, Wesley Parish wrote: So I know the 386BSD guy, Bill Jolitz. He worked for me at Sun, I hired him because of, well some Usenix details that are best left untold. He was unfairly hurt by Usenix, that's as much as I'll say. He's a good guy, a little weird, but so am I. He did some great work in 386BSD, it was ahead of Linux. I remember going into Fry's and sticking a 386BSD floppy in to see if it would boot. It usually did.

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 02:12:19AM -0600, Andy Kosela wrote: He was smart but sensitive. And pretty butt hurt over how he had been treated by the "in crowd" at Usenix. I got past that and found him a pleasure to work with, but I had to get past all that first. We were working together in person, I can imagine that working with him through email would be more than "very hard" unfortunately.