Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site wdl1.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxj!houxm!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!amdcad!fortune!wdl1!jbn From: jbn@wdl1.UUCP Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Is 4.2BSD a failure? Message-ID: <182@wdl1.UUCP> Date: Tue, 15-Jan-85 16:37:48 EST Article-I.D.: wdl1.182 Posted: Tue Jan 15 16:37:48 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 20-Jan-85 05:45:58 EST Sender: jrb@wdl1.UUCP Organization: Ford Aerospace, Western Development Laboratories Lines: 22 Nf-ID: #N:wdl1:17100032:000:1214 Nf-From: wdl1!jbn Dec 5 21:22:00 1984 [Flame. Personal Opinion.] 4.2BSD is an experiment that seems to have failed. I am speaking only of the kernel, not the rest of the system here. The much-touted ``fast file system'' does not seem to deliver anything like the promised order of magnitude performance improvement; in fact, overall 4.1BSD seems to slightly outperform 4.2. 4.2BSD has a huge resident kernel because of the large number of new and in many cases little used features. There are far more bugs, security holes, and general problems than with 4.1. The most significant addition was the support for networking, which may be the last gasp of the networking-inside- the-operating-system approach. (The state of the art is to use intelligent networking cards; Excelan and Communications Machinery make cards that provide IP/TCP services on an Ethernet; these cost about the same as ordinary dumb Ethernet cards.) Other than networking, it is hard to point to a new feature in the kernel that is really necessary and is in fact used by any significant volume of software. What are other's thoughts? Was all the trouble worth it? Should further work proceed from a 4.1 base? A system V base? Or what? John Nagle