5 Jan
2017
5 Jan
'17
1:05 a.m.
On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:56 AM, Nevin Liber <nevin(a)eviloverlord.com> wrote:
The release was (or was supposed to be, and I remember
it as) "SunOS 4.1.3
u1" because we were told on no uncertain terms that there would be no
release called "SunOS 4.1.4" but it was OK to send out an update release
rolling up patches previously sent. I was *never* told why, which only made
me (and my management chain) push harder. There were enough changes to
warrant U1, U2, and U3 releases; I know U1 went out the door, and I know
that U3 was ready for release when I departed, I don't recall whether U2
made it out the door or not. I do not recall the method we used to triage
the changes into three releases.
I don't think so. Solbourne had a OS/MP based on 4.1.3 (I think OS/MP
4.1C) and another based on 4.1.3u1 (OS/MP 4.1D), but there was never
an OS/MP 4.1E.
There was really no explicit "try to make SunOS 4
scale up on SMP machines"
in this code -- in fact, for many common workloads, things scaled
surprisingly well. The NFS crew in particular indicated they were quite
happy with our scaling, but I would defer to Neal Nuckolls on that score.
The purpose of U1 and subsequent updates was to bring a number of kernel bug
fixes back into the mainline sources (um, maybe some of these fixes improved
scaling, but it was not the basis for the release).
This only group I'm aware of was the Solbourne Kernel team that
produced a ASMP version based on 4.0 and hired David Barak to make it
SMP for the OS/MP 4.1 based on SunOS 4.1. It scaled to about 16 CPUs,
IIRC, based on Solbourne's own MP designs. I worked at Solbourne at
the time in the other interesting technology to come out of Solbourne
(the OI GUI toolkit, which has become at best a historical footnote).
Warner