On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.