4 Jan
2022
4 Jan
'22
8:42 a.m.
On Mon, Jan 03, 2022 at 09:28:02PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
On Mon, Jan 03, 2022 at 03:44:11PM -0800, Larry McVoy
wrote:
Yes, absolutely. I worked in the kernel group in building 5. That was
pretty much the best group of people I have been a part of. That team
could have done anything, SMP was not a problem for them. They for sure
could have made SunOS scale. The people who didn't leave were the people
who made Solaris work.
That said, I have to give credit to the group of people I built who
did BitKeeper. I'd stand them up against the Sun kernel team and they
would win. Smaller group, stellar bunch of people.
I'm happy that I got to be part of both teams.
On Mon, Jan 03, 2022 at 05:21:51PM -0600, Doug
McIntyre wrote:
I would have thought that if we consider the amount of engineering
resources to that was invested to get from Solaris 2.0 to 2.5.1, if
that had instead been invested into making SunOS a scalable SMP OS,
that it would have been doable. Do you think that's fair? 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.