[rescue] What to do with the SS20

[Peter Stokes]

Hi

I was at a disti for Solbourne in the UK during the early nineties and if I
remember the kernel was Asymmetric MP, rather than full on SMP, but in general
it did work well, the killer for them was Sun's agressive selling in the UK
with FUD and the fact that they ran out of money before the Solaris 2 version
was released. The kit was reliable and beat the then Sun kit hands down on the
server front. The workstations were not that exciting only having small caches
and not that fast from memory.

There was a rumour that a company in the US ported Solaris 2, but by that time
we had gone our separate ways.

Anyone have any of the 600 or 900 Solboure systems still?

Peter
---------------------------
Peter Stokes
Ashlyn Computer Services
Tel: 01636 627990
Mbl: 07977 532320
---------------------------



On 23 Jun 2014, at 03:30, Steven M Jones <smj+rescue at crash.com> wrote:

> On 06/22/2014 05:37 PM, Sandwich Maker wrote:
>> " Also, I believe all SunOS 4 releases can only have one CPU executing
>> " kernel code at a time. I'm not sure if technically you have to call that
>> " asymmetric multiprocessing, rather than SMP.
>>
>> now that you mention this, i think you're right.  it wasn't a problem
>> for ${WORK[1995]}, as we were doing complex fpga layouts and sims, and
>> 2 cpus meant the engineers - and the systems - could do useful work on
>> one cpu while the big heavy sim app hogged the other one.
>
> I was at a place for most of 1991 where I first met Solbourne gear, and
> one major use was to run Synopsys and other EDA software. Whatever the
> task, the Solbournes just soaked up the load and kept going.
>
>> ... solbourne dug into the kernel
>> code and implemented fine-grained spinlocks, but sun basically just
>> put one giant spinlock around the entire kernel.  since solbourne
>> licensed sun's codebase, why couldn't sun just build on their work?
>
> I suspect the answer lies with the work Sun was already doing on SVR4
> with AT&T in the late 80s, so that they already had a path that would
> lead there with the new OS. Why do more than temporarily hold off the
> threat from Solbourne and others until that was ready?  But I wouldn't
> mind finding out from those in the know. Especially if it's something
> like, "Oh, we didn't think they'd do that, so we didn't include it in
> the license terms..."
>
> --S.
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