On Mon, Jan 3, 2022, 4:44 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> 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:
> > > On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 3:23 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > > Yeah, to be fair, by the time Solaris 2.3 or 2.4 came around, it was
> > > > mostly up to par.  (Or maybe it was because Moore's law meant that we
> > > > didn't care any more.  :-)
> > >
> > > I have some vague memories that we had to do something like double the
> > > RAM in our SPARCstations to make Solaris 2 feel comfortable. At the
> > > time, that was a pretty serious outlay in an academic department.
> > > 2.5.1 felt like the first version that was _truly_ usable.
> >
> > 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.
>

Solbourne had it's OS/MP which did do SMP with a subsystem locking
strategy. This worked reasonably well for the time. So it was quite
possible. Solbourne died, though because it couldn't get Solaris sources
soon enough to do a port that mattered...

Warner

>