I'm reading 'The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD' to learn about the
internals of the NetBSD kernel. It's a fine book, very informative and
very interesting to read. But it's only half the truth about NetBSD,
because it has evolved a lot since 0.9, which I understand was almost
4.4BSD-lite.

Therefore I'm also collecting a list of things that have been added (and
removed) to the kernel since 4.4BSD, and this is what I have come up with 
so far: Have I missed anything?

- UVM has replaced the old BSD/Mach VM. UVM is very well documented in
Chuck Cranors dissertation and USENIX 99 paper.

- Paul Mackerras' PPP implementation was integrated in 1.2.

- ipfilter was integrated in 1.2 too.

- RAIDframe from CMU was integrated in 1.4. CMU has lots of papers on RAID
technology and some on RAIDframe too.

- Mc. Kusicks soft-updates has been added to FFS. There is his USENIX 99
paper, that seems to be a fine design description.

- IPv6 from the KAME project has been integrated.

- support for various file systems has been written.

- compatibility modes (e.g. Linux).

- there is some talk of a NetBSD disk framework, but I can't track much
information about it.

- there's also some talk about NetBSD's framework for writing portable
device drivers.

And then there is the support for various architectures, devices, buses
etc.

I hope to make a list of documents that can be included at
NetBSD.org. I feel that a short guide to kernel design documentation is
good to have, especially since there really is so much fine
documentation. Most notably in 'The Design and Implementation...', but
also in the different USENIX papers and dissertations on the various
components.

- Anders

-- 
Anders Dinsen
anders@dinsen.net
http://dinsen.net/anders/