Marshall Kirk McKusick (b. January 19, 1954) 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. He is known to friends and colleagues as "Kirk".

McKusick received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University, and his Master's degree and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

He lives in California with Eric Allman, his domestic partner since graduate school. 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). More recently, he implemented soft updates, a new approach to maintaining disk integrity after a crash or power outage, in FFS, and a revised version of UFS known as "UFS2".

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

External links

• McKusick's home page
• McKusick, 1999 Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix (from the book Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution ISBN 1-56592-582-3)