Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 09:29:31AM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> I am surprised how good Sun's technical marketing was for you to think
> this.  Linux has scaled better since the early 2000s.  The Solaris
> x86-64 port has some real gaffes in it to this day at least as visible
> in the OpenSolaris derivative codebases, serialization in the locking
> primitives kind of things.

I think the SPARC bias was very apparent.  Sun loved their own chips, to
their detriment IMO.  I have no personal knowledge of the x86_64 efforts,
but I do know about the Sun i386 efforts.  That was very looked down
upon by the powers that were, the main kernel group, etc.  Those poor
guys had an uphill battle to get anything integrated, nobody wanted it.

So it would not surprise me in the slightest if the x86_64 was a half
assed effort without a lot of attention to stuff like performance.
I don't think they wanted Solaris/x86 to be a success, they wanted
SPARC to be a success.

It was that kind of attitude that has pissed me off at every company
I have ever worked for.  I'm fine with marketing to customers but I
hate it when people believe their own marketing.  Internally, I think
you should be very skeptical, judgemental, critical, whatever you want
to call it, if your code sucks or your hardware sucks, don't pretend
it doesn't, own it and fix it.  That's how you win.

> On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 06:57:41PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >>
> >> But all that said, you need to be specific about what perf you care
> >> about.  These days the kernel is far more complicated, NUMA etc,
> >> and you might care about parallel make (I doubt it) or you might care
> >> about Oracle or something like that.
> >
> > It wouldn't surprise me if Solaris was more scalable for gazillion
> > dollar SMP machines with a huge number of cores.  That was one of the
> > reason as I recall why Solaris had a reputation of being slow; being
> > scalable to big (and much more profitable) servers was considered more
> > important than the smaller systems that were probably more numerous
> > (but not nearly as profitable).
> >
> >                                         - Ted

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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm