Chuck Cranor's dissertation on his UVM was floating around in PostScript
form a little ways back.  I got sidetracked in my reading of it around
page 80 (out of about 250 or 260), but he discusses the history of the BSD
virtual memory system somewhere in the early pages.

The very short of it, as I recall, is that BSD's original virtual memory
was very VAX-oriented, which hindered portability.  Not too many years
afterward, the cleaner Mach virtual memory system was imported.  If I
remember Chuck Cranor's document correctly, the importing of Mach's
virtual memory took place in the 80's.

(I could say more of what I remember, but you're better off reading Chuck
Cranor's dissertation.  I think that there used to be a link to it off of
the NetBSD pages, or possibly from one of Chuck Cranor's pages which in
turn was linked to by a NetBSD UVM page.)


Incidental: What are the odds that we can get Chuck Cranor's dissertation
into the NetBSD distribution as supplementary documentation?  If he is
willing, and there are no legal barriers, then I would like to see it
there.  (Chuck, are you reading this?  (^&)

(Hm.  How about /usr/pkgsrc/docs/* to download and process supplementary
docs, for that matter?)

(ramble)


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu