Is 4.2BSD a failure?

[jbn at wdl1.UUCP]

[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