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Marshall Kirk McKusick

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Marshall Kirk McKusick (normally uses Kirk) is a computer scientist, famous for his extensive work on BSD, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He is president of the USENIX Association until June 27, 2004.

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.

Some of his largest contributions have been to the file system. He helped design the original Berkeley Fast File System (FFS), still present in Solaris as UFS, the Unix File System.

More recently, he integrated soft updates into FFS. Soft updates are an approach to maintaining disk integrity after a crash or power outage that is an alternative to journaling file systems. Instead of duplicating metadata writes in a journal, softupdates work by properly ordering the metadata writes to guarantee consistency after a crash. Like journaling it does not guarantee no lost data, but does make sure the filesystem is consistent.

He was also primarily responsible for creating the complementary features of filesystem snapshots and background fsck. After the filesystem snapshot, the filesystem can be brought up immediately after a power outage, and fsck, the file system check and repair tool can run as a background process.

McKusick had previously served as president of USENIX from 1990 to 1992, and was elected president again in 2002.

Eric Allman has been McKusick's domestic partner for over twenty years.

The Design and Implementation series of books that McKusick contributed heavily to are well regarded as very high quality books and have been influential in the development of the BSD descendents, and have contributed to their well thought out, cohesive 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.

Soon to be available: (Expected August, 2004)

  • M. McKusick, George Neville-Neil: The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-70245-2
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