January 2003
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
13h 22m
English
Content preview from UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation
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Sun Microsystems and SunOS
Sun Microsystems was founded in 1982 by four people including current CEO Scott McNeally and BSD developer Bill Joy. In their first year they released their first workstation based on hardware developed at Stanford University and on the BSD operating system.
Sun has continued from day one to innovate and enhance UNIX. In order to provide remote file access they introduced the Network File System (NFS) and the VFS/vnode architecture to support it.
In 1987 Sun and AT&T joined forces to develop UNIX System V Release 4, which combined the best of SunOS and System V Release 3.2. SVR4 encompassed many of the ideas that Sun had implemented including VFS/vnodes, NFS, and their virtual memory architecture, which cleanly divides memory management into machine dependent and machine independent layers. Sun, together with IBM and HP, continues to take UNIX to the enterprise, continually enhancing their UNIX offerings while retaining compatibility at the standards level.