John Birrell, one of the FreeBSD project committers, died.

As a result of the stroke, John Birrell, a well-known FreeBSD project developer, who has been involved in the development of the project for more than 12 years, died. Among John’s developments, portraying DTrace dynamic tracing technology, libdwarf library development, FreeBSD porting to DEC Alpha and Sun UltraSPARC-T1 (Niagara) architectures, creating a multi-threaded (pthread) library libc_r.

One of John’s latest developments, which unfortunately remained unfinished, is the jbuild build system, which he worked on at Juniper Networks and which would replace the standard FreeBSD build mechanisms in the future. In fact, jbuild is a modified version of the make utility, to which extended tools for controlling dependencies are added, working through tracking all write and read operations, thanks to integration with DTrace or the special module filemon. The development can significantly reduce the number of operations when performing actions like “make universe” and “make buildworld”.

In addition to FreeBSD, John Birrell participated in the development of systems such as SysVR2 / 3, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSF / 1, SCO, VxWorks, LynxOS, and Microware's OS9, and was involved in open source projects NetBSD and OpenBSD.
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The source is news .

ps rest in peace