When porting the Plan 9 kernel to Sun, I struggled a bit with the MMU. Someone offered to send me the code for Spring (I think) to help me understand it. The relevant code was far bigger than the entire Plan 9 kernel code I was porting. It didn't help at all.
Dave Cheriton gave a talk, I think at the first OSDI, where he spoke about a system he'd written. He said it was small, only 100K lines. I said I considered that large; our kernel at the time was about 25K lines and was far more complete than his research toy. "Yeah," he said, "but those are Bell Labs lines." I took that as a compliment, but he might not have meant it that way. -rob
