[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Thu Jan 5 05:05:48 AEST 2017


On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:56 AM, Nevin Liber <nevin at 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



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