Marshall Kirk McKusick | |
|---|---|
%2c_Brisbane%2c_Queensland%2c_Australia--2011-01.jpg) McKusick in 2011 | |
| Born | January 19, 1954 (1954-01-19) (age 72) Wilmington, Delaware, U.S. |
| Education | Cornell University (BS) University of California, Berkeley (MS,MS,PhD) |
| Known for | BSD,FreeBSD,UFS,soft updates,BSD Daemon |
| Spouse | Eric Allman |
Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is an Americancomputer scientist, known for his extensive work onBSD UNIX, from the 1980s toFreeBSD in the present day. He served on the board of theUSENIX Association from 1986 to 1992 and again from 2000 to 2006,[1] including terms as president from 1990 to 1992 and 2000 to 2002.[2] He served on the editorial board ofACM Queue Magazine from 2002 to 2019.[3] He served on the board of theFreeBSD Foundation from 2012 to 2022.[4] He is known to friends and colleagues as "Kirk".
McKusick lives in California withEric Allman, his partner since graduate school, whom hemarried in October, 2013.[5][6]
McKusick received hisB.S. inelectrical engineering fromCornell University, and twoM.S. degrees (in 1979 and 1980 respectively) and aPh.D. in computer science from theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1984.[7]
McKusick started withBSD by virtue of the fact that he shared an office at Berkeley withBill Joy, who spearheaded the beginnings of the BSD system.[8]
Some of his largest contributions to BSD have been to thefile system. He helped to design the originalBerkeley Fast File System (FFS). In the late 1990s, he implementedsoft updates, an alternative approach to maintaining disk integrity after a crash or power outage, in FFS, and a revised version ofUnix File System (UFS) known as "UFS2". Themagic number used in the UFS2 super block structure reflects McKusick's birth date:#define FS_UFS2_MAGIC 0x19540119 (as found in/usr/include/ufs/ffs/fs.h onFreeBSD systems). It is included as aneaster egg.
He was also primarily responsible for creating the complementary features of filesystemsnapshots and backgroundfsck (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, andfsck can run as a background process.
TheDesign and Implementation series of books are regarded as very high-quality works in computer science.[citation needed] They have been influential in the development of theBSD descendants.[citation needed] TheBSD Daemon, often used to identify BSD, is copyrighted by Marshall Kirk McKusick.[9]
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