[geeks] Sun vs. SysVr4

[Dave McGuire]

On August 22, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [[ since you seem to have a problem understanding the issues and facts
> here I've moved this to over to geeks to hash it out....  or you can
> just reply privately if you prefer!  ;-)  ]]

  *sigh*

  I'm not on geeks.

> [ On Wednesday, August 22, 2001 at 01:27:59 (-0400), Dave McGuire wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: [rescue] FDDI questions.
> >
> >   Rather than spout uptime figures and compare the stability of, say,
> > Solaris 2.3 (which was the first release of Solaris to even get
> > noticed, and still not accepted, by the production SunOS4 crowd), I
> > will ignore this painfully obvious spew of flame bait trolling.  I
> > will give you the opportunity to drop this now...otherwise I will
> > proceed to tear your point to shreds.  Nothing personal.
> 
> vs. say the uptime of some 3b2's I know about?  :-)

  Solaris doesn't run on 3B2s.  We are talking about SOLARIS here...and
I'm saying that your statement that Solaris replaced SunOS because it
was more "production quality" is total horseshit.

> part of what I mean by "production quality" also has to do with the
> ability to manage subsystems on the box properly and reliabily, as well
> as the ability to add on third party software right from drivers down to
> user utilities, all with reliability and predicatability in a
> cross-platform environment

  ...which is just becoming true about Solaris NOW, but sure wasn't
seven years ago when Sun was trying to cram it down our throats.
There was a multi-year gap during which Sun had NO production-quality
operating system that their salesdroids were pushing.  They were
busily denying the existence of SunOS4.1.4 while Solaris2.3/2.4
machines were crashing all over their installed base due to library
memory leaks and other stupid bugs that should have been caught years
prior.

> We're just now finally getting some of the features necessary to build
> production quality systems in NetBSD -- it's taken decades to bend some
> *BSD weenies into understanding what it takes operationally to run true
> production systems.

  Oh good lord.  If this isn't a perfect example of pure SysV vs. BSD
religion, I don't know what is.

> >   What I will mention, though, is that Sun had NO part in the
> > development of SVR4.  It was new around 1988/1989...before it was even
> > an itch in Sun's pants.
> 
> Oh, how wrong you are!  ;-)
> 
> You appear to have fallen victim to the AT&T propoganda campaign to try
> to distance themselves from their involvement with Sun in the
> development of SysVr4.
> As a matter of fact Sun did large amounts of the work on SysVr4 on
> contract to, and in partnership with, AT&T....  I had many friends
> working at AT&T (and some later at USL) and I have heard all the gorry
> details first hand....

  It seems that I have indeed fallen victim to said propaganda.  I
wasn't a Sun person in 1989...I was a dyed-in-the-wool VMS-aholic.  I
mean, sysadmin.  But that doesn't change the fact that the releases of
Solaris that SunSales was trying to push on us were FAR inferior to
the existing SunOS4 installations in many respects...most importantly
reliability.

...[long and very informative SysV dev history deleted]

> I was porting some major applications and systems software to dozens and
> dozens of different Unix platforms in the late 1980's and early 1990's
> and I had early access to many versions of SysVr4 at that time.  Though
> I didn't work directly at either Sun or AT&T, I had in some ways a
> unique view of industry opinions and events since I was in many vendor's
> porting labs during that time, and I had some pretty high-level access
> to quite a few of each of their developers too (esp. at Pyramid and IBM,
> and unofficially at AT&T, though also at Unisys, Fujitsu, Sequent, &
> NEC).

  Yeah, yeah.  I've been writing code for 20 years myself, man.  Let's
not get into a battle of credentials.  That's not the point.

> Did you know, for instance, that the official sparc port of SysVr4 was
> done for AT&T not by Sun, but rather by Fujitsu (who were back then a
> big Sun partner too! ;-), because of their split?  IIRC the official
> MIPS port was done by NEC, though the m68k and m88k ports were done by
> Motorola.  AT&T of course did the 3b2 and i386 ports.

  Eeeek.  Fujitsu?  No, I didn't know that.  This is almost as scary as
the fact that initial NT development took place on the i860 and
eventually ran on the DECstation-5000.

> All this said though, I still say SysVr4 was the best thing to happen to
> SunOS.  Certainly SunOS-4 already had many of the early kernel features
> that were to appear in SysVr4, and even some of the user-land stuff, as
> well as stuff taken from AT&T, such as RFS.  SysVr4 was, after all, as
> much Sun's brain-child as it was AT&T's....

  I will easily concede that your recollection of the specific business
dealings and distribution of development effort in the early days of
Solaris and SVR4 is far more detailed than mine.  However, having had
to suffer through a bunch of suited idiots trying to replace my whole
machine room full of 1-year-plus uptime indestructible SunOS4 boxes
with Solaris2.3/2.4 machines that couldn't stay up for more than a few
days at a time, I wholeheartedly disagree with your assertion that
moving to SysV made Sun's operating system any better.

  NOW, of course, yes, it's better.  What do you expect when a company
abandons development on one operating system and plows forward on
another.  The thing that I have a problem with, though, is that SunOS4
was dropped, and its replacement wasn't ready (by any useful measure
of "ready") for a couple of YEARS afterwards.

         -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Laurel, MD