Education
University of Wisconsin–Madison.
University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He earned Bachelor of Science and Mississippi degrees in computer science in 1985 and 1987, respectively, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has been employed by Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and Google. His work generally included performance enhancements to the various Unix operating systems developed by his employers. While McVoy worked at Sun, he worked on a peer-to-peer Supply Chain Management system named TeamWare that would form the basis of his later BitKeeper product.
McVoy started working with the project around its 0.9.7 version and developed the LMbench kernel benchmark.
LMbench is still active as of 2007, with Carl Staelin acting as maintainer. While working at Sun in the early 1990s, McVoy and a number of other high-profile Unix community members urged the company to open-source their flagship Unix product, SunOS, to compete with Microsoft"s new Windows Northwest Territories operating system.
The proposal would have created a copyleft version of SunOS at a time before had reached its 1.0 version.
The BitKeeper source control system was also developed and integrated into the development process, but disagreements between McVoy and some members of the development community prompted the development of the git tool that began serving as the source control system for the kernel in 2005.
