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For more history, perhaps see "A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem by Marshall Kirk McKusick": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BbMBdGPoHM https://www

For more history, perhaps see "A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem by Marshall Kirk McKusick": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BbMBdGPoHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BbMBdGPoHM * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Kirk_McKusick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Kirk_McKusick In the article the classic The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System is mentioned: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5767.The_Design_and_Implementation_of_the_4_4Bsd_Operating_System https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5767.The_Design_and_Impl... See also the more recent The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112388.The_Design_and_Implementation_of_the_FreeBSD_Operating_System https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112388.The_Design_and_Im...

EarlKing 3y ago
Not entirely related, but recently I began re-reading Practical File System Design with the Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo. Not exactly an up-to-date text, but a good guide to the tradeoffs involved in designing a file system. * https://web.archive.org/web/20170213221835/http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170213221835/http://www.nobius...
- brazzy 3y ago
  Ahh, that brings back memories - I read that over 20 years ago in preparation for my master's thesis.
JdeBP 3y ago
I keep idly thinking about getting the last one. I have the 4.3 and 4.4 ones. I'm not sure that I'd find it useful, however. I wouldn't be surprised if it misses out stuff that one can see from the FreeBSD version control. For example: It's fairly well recorded that FreeBSD switched to Mewburn rc, which it got from NetBSD, in 2002. But what isn't so well recorded, that one can only really find out from the version control history, is that this was actually a regression in one aspect, as FreeBSD had some years earlier finally got rid of an old backwards-compatibility mechanism, that Mewburn rc promptly restored. * http://jdebp.info/FGA/rc.local-is-history.html http://jdebp.info/FGA/rc.local-is-history.html One of the interesting things about FreeBSD et al. is that one can reach back decades in version control and look at this stuff. Another example: Linux people often talk about BSD-style options to their "ps" command. But they actually aren't, and BSD has not documented any such things for the entire lifetime of any "ps" command on Linux. Inspecting BSD version control history one can find where the BSD "ps" switched to getopt(3) and changed its manual, and it was in 1990, a year before Linux even existed.
- eichin 3y ago
  BSD-style is more "anti-SVR4" style, but you also need to remember that everyone working on linux ps in 1991 had years of experience with BSD 4.3 and SunOS 4; the post-reno liberated BSDs (386, Free, Net, and a dozen others that only lasted a year or two) aren't really relevant to that use of the term.
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    > BSD-style is more "anti-SVR4" style Sure, but I'd say even more that SVR4 was the anti-BSD. AT&T should have accepted that BSD rocked and adopted it.
  - JdeBP 3y ago
    I don't need to have false memory syndrome, thank you. (-: Michael K. Johnson was an undergraduate at St. Olaf College at the time, simply not old enough to have had "years of experience" with commercial Unices. The reality is that this was not written by a bunch of old hands with tonnes of professional Unix experience. Branko Lankester was at the University of Amsterdam.
pengaru 3y ago
+1 for the McKusick books. The red one in particular was such a cherished publication in my collection, for years I wished I had an equivalent for the Linux kernel, it never quite arrived. There's also a series of videos from classes McKusick taught. Back in the 90s/early 2000s I attended some viewings of these at the apartment of some High Voltage Software employees back in IL. They'd convinced their employer to foot the bill on buying the full VHS set (I think it was $1k/tape), and hosted a bunch of viewing "parties". Whenever McKusick had to explain some virtual memory details, he'd have vi as the running process and some user started up emacs, then he'd walk through all the minutia of paging and swap. It was quite amusing at the time, he was a master at throwing fuel on the emacs vs. vi religious wars. I was never a huge freebsd fan, but these books were very well done and McKusick a tremendous asset to that community.

EarlKing 3y ago

Not entirely related, but recently I began re-reading Practical File System Design with the Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo. Not exactly an up-to-date text, but a good guide to the tradeoffs involved in designing a file system. * https://web.archive.org/web/20170213221835/http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170213221835/http://www.nobius...

brazzy 3y ago
Ahh, that brings back memories - I read that over 20 years ago in preparation for my master's thesis.

JdeBP 3y ago

I keep idly thinking about getting the last one. I have the 4.3 and 4.4 ones. I'm not sure that I'd find it useful, however. I wouldn't be surprised if it misses out stuff that one can see from the FreeBSD version control. For example: It's fairly well recorded that FreeBSD switched to Mewburn rc, which it got from NetBSD, in 2002. But what isn't so well recorded, that one can only really find out from the version control history, is that this was actually a regression in one aspect, as FreeBSD had some years earlier finally got rid of an old backwards-compatibility mechanism, that Mewburn rc promptly restored. * http://jdebp.info/FGA/rc.local-is-history.html http://jdebp.info/FGA/rc.local-is-history.html One of the interesting things about FreeBSD et al. is that one can reach back decades in version control and look at this stuff. Another example: Linux people often talk about BSD-style options to their "ps" command. But they actually aren't, and BSD has not documented any such things for the entire lifetime of any "ps" command on Linux. Inspecting BSD version control history one can find where the BSD "ps" switched to getopt(3) and changed its manual, and it was in 1990, a year before Linux even existed.

eichin 3y ago
BSD-style is more "anti-SVR4" style, but you also need to remember that everyone working on linux ps in 1991 had years of experience with BSD 4.3 and SunOS 4; the post-reno liberated BSDs (386, Free, Net, and a dozen others that only lasted a year or two) aren't really relevant to that use of the term.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  > BSD-style is more "anti-SVR4" style Sure, but I'd say even more that SVR4 was the anti-BSD. AT&T should have accepted that BSD rocked and adopted it.
- JdeBP 3y ago
  I don't need to have false memory syndrome, thank you. (-: Michael K. Johnson was an undergraduate at St. Olaf College at the time, simply not old enough to have had "years of experience" with commercial Unices. The reality is that this was not written by a bunch of old hands with tonnes of professional Unix experience. Branko Lankester was at the University of Amsterdam.

pengaru 3y ago

+1 for the McKusick books. The red one in particular was such a cherished publication in my collection, for years I wished I had an equivalent for the Linux kernel, it never quite arrived. There's also a series of videos from classes McKusick taught. Back in the 90s/early 2000s I attended some viewings of these at the apartment of some High Voltage Software employees back in IL. They'd convinced their employer to foot the bill on buying the full VHS set (I think it was $1k/tape), and hosted a bunch of viewing "parties". Whenever McKusick had to explain some virtual memory details, he'd have vi as the running process and some user started up emacs, then he'd walk through all the minutia of paging and swap. It was quite amusing at the time, he was a master at throwing fuel on the emacs vs. vi religious wars. I was never a huge freebsd fan, but these books were very well done and McKusick a tremendous asset to that community.