9 Jan
2022
9 Jan
'22
11:31 p.m.
There were others that also did Unix SMP (some on BSD). Encore offering
BSD, AT&T or Mach (their storage arrays contained a core cluster of 2 SMP
nodes, later bought by Sun); Sequent; and Pyramid dualPort OS/x around
1985/87.
Pyramid had dual-CPU 90Mx/98x and I think a single lock (memory fades a
bit). Later more fine-grained around the time of the 1-CPU 9810 up to 4-CPU
9845. Before eventually going to MIPS CPU SMPs, then adding MPP to the MIPS
range.
IIRC, this was on a mostly-BSD 4.2/4.3 base(?) when I worked in the Pyramid
team producing their POSIX threads library & parallel debugger (late 80s).
Although Pyramid did have their ATT "unverse" incorporated into the same
Unix, hence dualPort. So there was a bunch of SVR3/4 support included:
extra set of syscalls; u.u_universe to select which; conditional symbolic
links using u.u_universe to resolve to UCB or ATT paths for lib & bin dirs;
merged TTY driver with a superset of stty attributes; etc.
Apollo Domain had something similar to conditional symbolic links, but
expanding environment variables to determine the target path. Different
flexibility/overhead tradeoff.
I wonder if any dualPort or DC/OSx Pyramid source survives...
or the old Australian promo poster from PTC BURP, where I got elected the
PHB, standing like a dork at the console of a 9840 cabinet (I think I was
the only one in a long sleeve shirt that day, and had an emergency tie at
the back of my desk drawer, so...)
On Tue, 4 Jan 2022, 08:04 Greg 'groggy' Lehey, <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
On Monday, 3 January 2022 at 15:44:11 -0800, Larry
McVoy wrote:
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:
> 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.
An interesting question. I had always thought that SMP was (one of?)
the technical reasons why Sun moved from a BSD to a System V base.
Since then, of course, we've done lots of work on SMP support for at
least FreeBSD. Does anybody have an overview of how good the support
is compared to modern Solaris? Is there any intrinsic reason why one
should be better than the other?
Greg
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