[TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX")

Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Thu Mar 16 03:43:34 AEST 2017


On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 9:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 11:36:21AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>> Off-topic: Anyone ever run SunOS on a Sparc-10 or similar platform (670?)
>> with two processors? Was it my imagination or did it actually use both
>> processors?
>
> Yeah, SunOS 4.1.4 had some MP work done to it.  Pretty sure I posted
> about it here and dragged Greg Limes into it.  He was involved in that
> work.  I think it sort of worked up to 4 CPUs but as with all early
> kernel threading stuff it worked better when it was a 4 cpus of
> userland work, less so when it was 4 cpus of I/O.

Solbourne computer produced OS/MP, which was a SMPized version of
SunOS 4.1. It scaled to at least 16 CPUs. Userland was 100% compatible
with SunOS at the given revision level.  My team (the OI group) was
part of Solbourne for a while, so we got much of that gear when we
were spun out to ParcPlace. Our main build server had 12 CPUs, and it
was nice being able to do make -j 16. cfront was, for its time, quite
the pig. Now it's lightyears faster than clang, though produces lousy
code... OS/MP ran on hardware that was 50MHz SuperSparc CPUs and could
be configured up to 14 CPUs and a whopping 256MB of RAM...

Warner



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