On Mon, Jan 03, 2022 at 05:21:51PM -0600, Doug McIntyre wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 03, 2022 at 04:15:08PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 3:23 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> > > Yeah, to be fair, by the time Solaris 2.3 or 2.4 came around, it was
> > > mostly up to par.  (Or maybe it was because Moore's law meant that we
> > > didn't care any more.  :-)
> >
> > I have some vague memories that we had to do something like double the
> > RAM in our SPARCstations to make Solaris 2 feel comfortable. At the
> > time, that was a pretty serious outlay in an academic department.
> > 2.5.1 felt like the first version that was _truly_ usable.
>
> I'd agree, 2.4 was pretty slow and chunky, 2.5 was alright, but 2.5.1 was quite usable and stable.
> Also by this time, the hardware was going in directions that SunOS wouldn't keep up with.

Yeah, Doug is right, SunOS was pretty simple, it didn't really take advantage
of SMP, Greg Limes tried to thread it but it was too big a job for one guy.

That's not to say that SunOS couldn't have evolved into SMP, I'm 100%
sure it could have.  It just didn't.  It's a shame.