I am not up on all the details and full knowledge of the design
decisions and major and minor chunks of system src code for this process
et al. Some of that has to do with maintaining the known or perceived
differences in design from NetBSD as a BSD-4.4 system vs Linux and
Solaris as cited. The author in this process moved from these issues to
the fully general question of OS redesign here involving NetBSD.
I had come across earlier, in finding out about Mach, and microkernels
and their issues, references to subsequent research institutions working
further with how this is/was involved with Unix design (say at the time
of the market prominence of the NeXT). I recently checked to see what
was going on as a side interest. The Univ. of Utah, CS dept. Flux OSKit
project etc. have moved from this research question to a project around
a kit of tools for (poss. visualizing) and analyzing the structure and
design of a Unix -type or other operating systems, their components, and
the services and etc. an OS provides. I had thought I had seen this in
the pkgsrc tree as something interesting one night, so maybe this is an
obvious and annoyingly redundant suggestion. On rechecking today, I
did not find it via likely substring searches.
As an aid to how what is already known in the heads of experienced and
knowledgable people about NetBSD design, BSD-4.4 design, and where to
find and work with these at the right level immediately in the src tree,
including this discussion, the tools or ones like them of the Flux OSKit
might be an additional aid to research in the intended design direction
schema and testing its resulting functionality --- if this is not
already known, and people who know are not already involved with this.