admin/HP/HP.11.89

Ralph Hyver
101M
Hewlett-Packard Company
1266 Kifer Road
Sunnyvale, CA 94086

Dear Mr Hyver,

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).
Current funding for \s-1CSRG\s0 is provided by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (\s-1DARPA\s0) via the National Institute for
Science and Technology (\s-1NIST\s0, formerly \s-1NBS\s0).
This funding will expire April 1, 1990.
By mutual agreement,
only minimal additional funding from \s-1DARPA\s0 is expected.
We are seeking alternative funding from other sources so that we
can continue our work at the university.

Our strategy is to get three sources of funding,
each of which would provide approximately one third of our annual budget.
Annual gifts on the order of $250,000 would provide roughly
a third of the budget needed by \s-1CSRG\s0
for salaries and benefits, maintenance and network access fees,
travel and other expenses.
We are interested in seeking funding from organizations and
computer companies that use our system.
I hope that \s-1OSF\s0 would be interested in being such an organization.

I am enclosing a description of our current projects
along with a summary of our current operating budget.
For your convenience, I am providing a brief summary
of this paper in this letter.

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 will be included in the next systems to
be released by both \s-1OSF\s0 and \s-1AT&T\s0.

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

\s-1CSRG\s0 anticipates that its next major release, tentatively called
\s-14.4BSD\s0, will be completed and begin shipment towards the end
of next year.
The file system interface
will be extended to allow greater flexibility and performance, and a
public-domain version of \s-1NFS\s0 is expected to be included.
The new system integrates an implementation of the
\s-1ISO OSI\s0 networking protocols into the existing
socket interface and internal network architecture.
This work will include 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.
Both file system and networking interfaces
improve upon 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, and will be fully
exploited by the \s-1TCP/IP\s0 networking protocols.
The applicability of
these techniques in the \s-1OSI\s0 protocol suite will be investigated as
well.

The system will also include 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, 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.
Sincerely,
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick
cc: Mike Karels

MKM/tl