From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.2 (2018-09-13) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS, MAILING_LIST_MULTI,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.2 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (minnie.tuhs.org [45.79.103.53]) by inbox.vuxu.org (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTP id 1389cc18 for ; Thu, 20 Feb 2020 16:23:40 +0000 (UTC) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 8ECE893D45; Fri, 21 Feb 2020 02:23:39 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A6D6C93D2D; Fri, 21 Feb 2020 02:23:12 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 0332993D2D; Fri, 21 Feb 2020 02:23:09 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mcvoy.com (mcvoy.com [192.169.23.250]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 8A9BF93D1B for ; Fri, 21 Feb 2020 02:23:08 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mcvoy.com (Postfix, from userid 3546) id 3021235E141; Thu, 20 Feb 2020 08:23:08 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 08:23:08 -0800 From: Larry McVoy To: arnold@skeeve.com Message-ID: <20200220162308.GK30841@mcvoy.com> References: <202002180017.01I0HI0I1415945@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <20200219044444.GO30841@mcvoy.com> <615399517.295857.1582135972871@email.ionos.co.uk> <202002200727.01K7RFwj014313@freefriends.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <202002200727.01K7RFwj014313@freefriends.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30) Subject: Re: [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 12:27:15AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote: > Michael Huff wrote: > As Larry and others have pointed out, the unbundling of various components > was a big mistake by the vendors. It just made users angry and motivated > them to switch to other Unix systems. I really fault Sun for that one. There was a time when every open source package "just worked (TM)" if you built it on a Sun. All the other platforms were fiddly (leading to that monstrosity called autoconf), Sun just worked. So developers fought hard to get a Sun over the other platforms. When you have that lead and you screw over the people who gave you that lead, yeah, shame on you, Sun. > Also, early Solaris was a dog. Performance was poor. It improved over > time, but it wasn't until around Solaris 2.4 or 2.5 that running it > wasn't painful. Early Solaris was awful, just awful. They pulled out sockets and replaced them with Lachman's STREAMS based TCP/IP stack (really convergent's stack, I believe Lachman bought it from them). Performance was horrible, they brought in Mentat's stack and had to work on that, and eventually they brought back sockets. I dunno if there is any STREAMS stuff left, that was a horrible idea. Another idea, not sure if this shipped or not, was to use a thread for each 8K block headed to disk. The kernel stack was 24K (which is nuts but that's another story). So think about what a dd if=/dev/zero of=XXX does to your system. Each I/O costs you 8K (data) + 24K (stack) not to mention the other overhead for a thread. It means you only get to use 25% of ram for dirty pages. Bat shit crazy, right? I pointed all that out to the VM / FS people and they did it anyway, they were in love with threads. It was just as awful as I predicted and they ripped it all out and started over. To this day, I'm baffled that I could see that that was a horrible idea and really smart people did not. Lots of those people were smarter than me. It speaks to why you shouldn't push your shiny new feature too hard. And it lead to these in http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/quotes.html Think of it this way: threads are like salt, not like pasta. You like salt, I like salt, we all like salt. But we eat more pasta. --me A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines. --Alan Cox Both very on point for the Sun people.