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Marshall Kirk McKusick (normally called Kirk) is a computer scientist, famous for his extensive work on BSD, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 until June 27, 2004, and still serves on the board.
McKusick gained his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and his Masters and Ph. D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
He lives in California with Eric Allman, famous for writing the sendmail email processing software program, his domestic partner for over twenty years. McKusick is an avid wine collector and the temperature and vital statistics of his house and wine cellar are available on the web from his homepage.
BSD
Some of McKusick's largest contributions to BSD have been to the file system. He helped design the original Berkeley Fast File System (FFS), still present in Solaris as the Unix File System (UFS). More recently, he integrated soft updates, a new approach to maintaining disk integrity after a crash or power outage, into FFS.
He was also primarily responsible for creating the complementary features of filesystem snapshots and background fsck (file system check and repair), which both integrate closely with soft updates. After the filesystem snapshot, the filesystem can be brought up immediately after a power outage, and fsck can run as a background process.
The Design and Implementation series of books are regarded as very high quality works in computer science. They have been strongly influential in the development of the BSD descendants and have contributed to their cohesive and well-thought-out nature.
Bibliography
- S. Leffler, M. McKusick, M. Karels, J. Quarterman: The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, Addison-Wesley, January 1989, ISBN 0-201-06196-1. German translation published June 1990, ISBN 3-89319-239-5. Japanese translation published June 1991, ISBN 4-621-03607-6 (out of print).
- S. Leffler, M. McKusick: The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System Answer Book, Addison-Wesley, April 1991, ISBN 0-201-54629-9. Japanese translation published January 1992, ISBN 4-8081-8039-5 (out of print).
- M. McKusick, K. Bostic, M. Karels, J. Quarterman: The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, Addison-Wesley, April 1996, ISBN 0-201-54979-4. French translation published 1997, International Thomson Publishing, Paris, France, ISBN 2-84180-142-X.
- M. McKusick, George Neville-Neil: The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Addison-Wesley, July 2004, ISBN 0-201-70245-2
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