3 Apr
2021
3 Apr
'21
12:16 p.m.
On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 6:51 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Sun really needed SMP, because their CPU's
were slower than they used to
be compared to other vendors, but they could get parallel performance
numbers that weren't horrible.
On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote:
This drives me bonkers. SunOS 5 was fine, and quickly became a big
improvement over 4.1.x. I felt like Sun caught heck over the change
because they were the last major vendor to make the switch from BSD to
SysV, and all the BSD fans had moved to SunOS 4.1.x to get their BSD fix.
Please see https://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/why-solaris.html for a
list of benefits of 5.5 over 4.1.x.
That said, I have little inclination to run Solaris today. My computers
all run Debian, Ubuntu or Mint, though I do have a Windows Virtual Machine,
and a Haiku Virtual Machine too. I'm slowly migrating most of my machines
to running Debian.
We never had a need for SMP, so we didn't miss it.
SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people,
is ancient history and
is basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work
to get that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the
hat layer from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work).
SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the
decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits
were in charge instead of the real workers.