Kirk McKusick
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick writes books and articles, teaches classes on UNIX- and BSD-related subjects, and provides expert-witness testimony on software patent, trade secret, and copyright issues particularly those related to operating systems and filesystems. He has been a developer and committer to the FreeBSD Project since shortly after its founding in 1993. While at the University of California at Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and was the Research Computer Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. He earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and did his graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received master's degrees in computer science and business administration and a doctoral degree in computer science. He has twice been president of the board of the Usenix Association, served nine years as a board member and treasurer of the FreeBSD Foundation, is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of ACM, and AAAS.
In his spare time, he enjoys swimming, scuba diving, and wine collecting. The wine is stored in a specially constructed wine cellar (accessible from the Web at http://www.mckusick.com/~mckusick/) in the basement of the house that he shares with Eric Allman, his partner of 45-and-some-odd years and husband since 2013.
Sessions
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick
Author and Consultant
Who Should Take this Course
This course provides a broad overview of how the FreeBSD kernel implements its basic services. It will be most useful to those who need to learn how these services are provided. Individuals involved in technical and sales support can learn the capabilities and limitations of the system; applications developers can learn how to effectively and efficiently interface to the system; systems programmers without direct experience with the FreeBSD kernel can learn how to maintain, tune, and interface to such systems. This course is directed to users who have had at least a year of experience using a UNIX-like system. They should have an understanding of fundamental algorithms (searching, sorting, and hashing) and data structures (lists, queues, and arrays).
Description
This course will provide a firm background in the kernel services and I/O structure of the FreeBSD kernel. The course will cover basic kernel services, locking, process structure, scheduling, signal handling, jails, capsicum sandboxing, and virtual and physical memory management. The kernel I/O structure will be described showing how I/O is multiplexed, disks are managed, special devices are configured, and system virtualization is done. The presentations will emphasize code organization, data structure navigation, and algorithms. It will not cover the machine specific parts of the system such as the implementation of device drivers.
Morning - Kernel Overview
- Process structure
- Locking
- Communications
- Process Groups and Sessions
- Jails
- Scheduling
- Signals and timers
- Virtual memory management
Afternoon - Kernel I/O structure
- I/O data structures
- Disk Management
- Multiplexing I/O
- Autoconfiguration strategy
- Configuration of a device driver
Course Text
Prior to taking the course, students are recommended to obtain a copy of the course text: Marshall Kirk McKusick, George Neville-Neil, and Robert N. M. Watson, ``The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System'', Second Edition, Pearson Education, Boston, MA September 2014, ISBN-13: 978-0-321-96897-5, ISBN-10: 0-321-96897-2.
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick
Author and Consultant
Who Should Take this Course
This course provides a broad overview of how the FreeBSD kernel implements its basic services. It will be most useful to those who need to learn how these services are provided. Individuals involved in technical and sales support can learn the capabilities and limitations of the system; applications developers can learn how to effectively and efficiently interface to the system; systems programmers without direct experience with the FreeBSD kernel can learn how to maintain, tune, and interface to such systems. This course is directed to users who have had at least a year of experience using a UNIX-like system. They should have an understanding of fundamental algorithms (searching, sorting, and hashing) and data structures (lists, queues, and arrays).
Description
This course will provide a firm background in the filesystems and networking capabilities supported by the FreeBSD kernel. The course describes the VFS filesystem interface that supports multiple filesystem types. The course covers the implementation and capabilities of the UFS filesystem and the techniques for maintaining filesystem consistency. The filesystem section ends with a description of the ZFS filesystem capabilities, implementation, and integration into FreeBSD. The course also covers the socket-based network architecture, layering, and implementation. The socket communications primitives and internal layering will be discussed, with emphasis on the interfaces between the layers; the TCP/IP implementation will be used as an example. A discussion of routing issues and the netmap interface will be included. The presentations will emphasize code organization, data structure navigation, and algorithms. It will not cover the machine specific parts of the system such as the implementation of device drivers.
Morning - Filesystems Overview
- Filesystem organization
- Block I/O system (buffer cache)
- Support for multiple filesystems
- UFS Filesystem implementation
- ZFS Filesystem implementation
Afternoon - Networking Implementation
- System layers and interfaces
- Internet Protocols
- Mbufs and control blocks
- Routing issues
- TCP algorithms
Course Text
Prior to taking the course, students are recommended to obtain a copy of the course text: Marshall Kirk McKusick, George Neville-Neil, and Robert N. M. Watson, ``The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System'', Second Edition, Pearson Education, Boston, MA September 2014, ISBN-13: 978-0-321-96897-5, ISBN-10: 0-321-96897-2.
In 2023 the FreeBSD Project celebrated its thirtieth year of providing a complete system distribution. This talk tries to understand what it is that has made FreeBSD one of the few long-term viable open source projects. Most of the projects with long-term successes are sponsored by companies that base their products around the open-source software that they actively nurture. While FreeBSD has companies actively using and supporting it, they have come and gone over the years; none has been the primary long-term proponent of it. Thus the FreeBSD community has been the biggest factor in sustaining the project. Often open-source communities depend on long-term leadership of key individuals, for example Linus Torvolds with Linux. FreeBSD has managed to successfully bring in several new leaders over its lifetime which has been key to its ability to continue to adapt to the new challenges that it faces. This talk is based on the article of the same title that I wrote in the May/June FreeBSD Journal that had a 30-year retrospective of FreeBSD.