[rescue] Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: patrick at mail.zill.net (Patrick Giagnocavo)
" 
" 
" My guess (I don't have any inside knowledge) of Solaris's portability
" is that it is pretty good, since we know that the codebase runs on
" SPARC 32 and 64bit and x86 32 and 64bit, and ran at some point on PPC
" (and there are hints it ran on Alpha and MIPS too).

i don't have any inside knowledge either, but -- at some level, you
have to tune the kernel to the architecture, unless you accept some
sort of lowest common denominator, like the original at&t sV portable
kernel which was equally bad on all platforms.  iirc on vaxen dec unix
had twice the performance of sVr3, and remember that solaris 2 didn't
start to develop proformance and stability until sun replaced the sV
kernel - about 2.4?  and i was told by a hpux 10 developer, in no
uncertain terms, that the sV kernel was <crap>.  10.20 and probably 11
too, had a bsd-based kernel.

so i'm wondering what kind of effort sun could've put into crafting
alpha and/or mips kernels.

{btw, 2.5.1 was the only ver that ran on ppc; ibm iron, not macs]
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought