admin/HP/HP.09.90

Dr. John Limb
IAG, Building 46G
Hewlett-Packard Company
19046 Pruneridge Ave.
Cupertino, CA 95014

Dear Dr. Limb,

I am writing to you in my role as the head of operating
system and networking research for the \s-1UNIX\s0 project in the Computer
Science Division of the University of California, Berkeley, known as
the Computer Systems Research Group (\s-1CSRG\s0).
In the past year funding for our group has been provided by
Hewlett-Packard and the Open Software Foundation (\s-1OSF\s0).
As the period of that funding is drawing to a close,
we are hopeful that you will renew your support for the coming year
so that we can continue our work at the university.
A gift on the order of $120,000 would provide roughly
a quarter of the budget needed by \s-1CSRG\s0
for salaries and benefits, maintenance and network access fees,
travel and other expenses.

The goal of the \s-1CSRG\s0 project
is to use leading edge research ideas in a stable and reliable
implementation that solves current problems in operating systems research.
The project also includes incorporation of network protocols and other
subsystems into the operating system while maintaining consistency
with the existing system call interface.
The resulting system is widely used by other
researchers in operating systems and network protocols.
The most recent two releases, \s-14.2BSD\s0
and \s-14.3BSD\s0, provide the
core of the standard networking and/or operating system software for
essentially all vendors of \s-1UNIX\s0-based workstations and minicomputers.
\s-14.3BSD\s0-based network support is included in the systems being
released by both \s-1OSF\s0 and \s-1AT&T\s0.

\s-1CSRG\s0 includes four full-time research staff (Mike Karels,
Keith Bostic, Marc Tietelbaum, and myself),
and one three-quarter-time programmer on loan
from another group (Keith Sklower).
In addition, two full-time administrative and secretarial people
handle licensing and software distribution as well as office support.

\s-1CSRG\s0 has just made a test release, \s-14.3BSD-R\s0eno,
that includes major new facilities.
It has a new filesystem interface that extends the old interface
to allow greater flexibility and performance.
Under the interface, we have included a freely redistributable
version of \s-1NFS\s0 that has already been adopted by \s-1OSF/1\s0.
We have also developed a memory based filesystem to provide a very
fast temporary filesystem (/tmp).
The released system integrates an implementation of the
\s-1ISO OSI\s0 networking protocols into the existing
socket interface and internal network architecture.
Both filesystem and networking interfaces improve on previous
work with better support for caching in layered architectures.
These caching techniques are based on work done by Van
Jacobson at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
Some of Van's work has been incorporated into the test release,
the rest will be incorporated in the future.
The system also includes an \s-1IEEE\s0 P1003.1 \s-1(POSIX)\s0 standard
operating system interface integrated with the existing system
interface in such a way that both interfaces are fully supported and
interoperate fully.
Finally, we have integrated the University of Utah's support for
the HP 300 series machines into our current source base.

We have several new projects for the coming year.
We are working on a revised internal network
architecture incorporating the best features of both the existing
socket support and the ``streams'' layering of the Ninth Edition
research version of \s-1UNIX\s0.
We expect to more easily incorporate Van's work into this framework.
We will also consider the applicability of Van's
techniques in the \s-1OSI\s0 protocol suite.
The system is expected to include a new
virtual memory system derived from that of the
public domain portion of the Mach operating system
from \s-1CMU\s0 and incorporated into \s-14.3BSD\s0 by the University of Utah.
We expect that the products of this work will become the interfaces and
implementations of choice for other operating systems and networking
researchers in the near future.
Finally we plan to broaden our base of hardware support to the HP 800
line of machines.
For this purpose we are requesting the donation of two HP 800's;
one 832 server and one 834 workstation.
Sincerely,
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick
cc: Mike Karels

MKM/tl