# Larry McVoy's home page

# Notice: I'm moving to a new job. New email is lm@who.net.

# Who am I?

I'm an engineer for Silicon Graphics, working in the networking group. I spend most of my time waving my hands and convincing other people they want to work on stuff that I think is important. The name server is an example, I got John Schimmel to work on that. I'm constantly trying to figure out how to make things go fast, which is why I wrote the lmbench benchmark suite. Lmbench measures the basic building blocks of a computer system. Occasionally, I have to do real work, like the BDS stuff mentioned below.

I live in San Francisco and divide my time there between my girlfriend, woodworking, playing pool, and riding motorcycles.

# Current stuff I'm working on (slides)

- lmbench benchmark suite with results
  Watch this space for a new lmbench in July.
- New disk benchmarking tools
- New free name server architecture
- Bulk Data Service: 50MB/sec over NFS
- EIS project (SGI internal only)
- BDS marketing talk of August 28 (SGI internal only)
- SuperHippi presentation for NSF on August 28 (SGI internal only)
- SGI networking roadmap (SGI internal only)

# Papers I've written

- lmbench usenix paper with Carl Staelin.
- SunOS UFS clustering usenix paper
- A proposal to unify Unix (sigh)
- A parallel NFS using RPC vectors (coauthor)
- A early paper describing high perf disks
- A description of the core of Sun's Teamware source management system
- SparcCluster 1 architecture - VLANs came from this
- Latest lmdd benchmarking source

# Personal stuff (lots of pictures)

## Me, my relatives, friends, etc.

- Me and my nephew Jacob at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. He was about 2 years old and still hadn't hit the terrible twos, I think his Mom must have done a good job. Here he is with his Mom about 7 months pregnant. The next one turned out to be a boy named Zeke.
- My brother Chris trying to look smart.
- I used to be even more crazy than I am now; here's a picture of me doing some stupid rollerblading tricks.
- My favorite picture of me.
- I work at home a lot and this is what that is like. My cat was pretty sick in that picture, but I nursed her back to the land of the living.
- Me studying.
- A really old picture of me in Mexico, with really long hair juggling.

## My cats

- I like cats and I have had two over the last 18 years (whew) or so. Here's Zoey after she's had a few. Looks possessed, doesn't she? Here's a better picture of her. Until she died around Christmas of 1994, she had outlasted all of my girlfriends - I had her for almost 14 years. I still miss her and sometimes look for her when I go into the kitchen - it's weird to think she's gone. I eventually decided not to mope over her forever and went and found Mama cat at the pound. That's Linux running on the PC next to her, she fixes a lot of mouse driver bugs. Here's another picture of Mama cat on the workbench . And one more of here in my van - she likes to travel, no kidding. One last shot of her.
- November '96: Mama cat is missing. We're still looking for her, but it has been two weeks and it isn't looking very hopeful.
- January '97: Mama cat is still missing. I go to the pound about once a week with no luck. It sucks.

## Fishing

- I like to fly fish (yeah, I tie my own, ooh, wow) and I took a trip with my friend John Weitz. John is a hot shot photographer and here he is at work. Here's John catching a trout in the Trinity Alps. This is me fishing in the upper Sacramento River. John was talking some shots of a cool old shed, so I took one too. Here's a shot that John took of me sitting in the doorway of that shed (warning: it's ~60Kb).
- This is the ultimate in fishing tall tails, except I have pictures to prove it happened. I was fishing in Canada and thought I had hooked some weeds. I was reeling it in when all at once it took off. Funny sort of fish, it felt weird. When I get closer, I saw that I had two fish - a little one that had hit the lure, and a big Northern Pike that had hit the little pike. I thought for sure he would let go when he saw me, but I guess he was hungry, because I picked him up. Pretty wild, huh?

## Wilderness

- I like to backpack a lot and I have some friends that go with me. Here's Neil with his dog Elvis and here they are again hard at work.
- Me cross country skiing in the Sierra back country. It was a weekend trip to Ostrander Hut/Lake (cool place). I think that is Yosemite Valley in the background, doesn't that look like half dome to you? Here's the same view about 5 years earlier with my friends John G., Bernd N., and Andy A.
- My Dad's Mad River canoe with a cover that my sister made (pretty cool cover, if you ask me, it kept us dry). We go canoeing in Canada quite a bit.

## Woodworking

- I am not just a computer nerd, I'm also a woodworking nerd, and I'm especially nerdy about hand planes. Many of those are a hundred years old, some are more than that ("they don't make 'em like they used to" definitely applies to tools). Here's my first effort at a real woodworking project, what else, a toolbox. Here's a view with the drawers open. The little box on top is a jewelry box (or whatever) I made for an old girlfriend. I live in San Francisco, in a flat, so my workshop is out on my back deck. That's a small jointer in the foreground and a table saw clamped to the rails in the background. It's a bit cramped, but it has a nice view. I finally decided to build a workbench. Here's the benchtop in the process of being hand planed flat (lotso shavings, huh?).
- I do stuff on commission sometimes, this is my last girlfriend with a bookshelf I built for a friend at work. It was pretty simple since it was a first try, but he liked it. Here's another picture of the bookshelf.
- Here I am proudly showing off a little TV cabinet made out of pine with some really interesting grain. That's the heartwood of the pine. Here's a closeup picture of the cabinet.
- Because space is tight in San Francisco, I think my next project will be a tall, thin chest of drawers sort of like a lingerie chest, only sized for guy's clothes. It's about six feet tall by 18 inches square, which I think is about right. This was drawn in James Clark's implementation of pic, in the groff tool suite. Perverse, I know.
- Here is a document on flattening hand planes, something that is frequently required for good performance.

## Amusements

- A song composed in my honor. No kidding. It's pretty cute but you might need to know a little about Sun's internal politics to completely get it.

- A letter that Sun's lawyers recently sent. It's amazing how frigging self centered people can be. I got yer Java right here, buddy.

  A few days later, the net responds.

- Here are a bunch of quotes that I either liked or were attributed to me. A lot of these are pretty nerdy engineer inside jokes, you've been warned.

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