[rescue] Solaris not stable till release 2.x?????? WAS::Re: [geeks] Rumors flying

[Andrew M Hoerter]

On 12/6/16 19:05, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   2.3 ran in short spurts between crashes.  2.4 ran in longer spurts
> between crashes.  During a good time, 2.4 would stay up for about two
> whole weeks.  Contrast that with the SunOS4 machines on the other side
> of the datacenter which frequently had uptimes measured in multiple years.
>
>   The typical failure mode was kernel panics (usually in the network
> stack but sometimes in device drivers) and hard lockups.  There were no
> hardware problems. (i.e., same behavior on 100+ machines)

Based on stories I've read from inside Sun, those early 2.x years marked 
a significant change towards fine-grained locking inside the kernel so 
that SMP systems could scale, which was a perpetual source of subtle and 
serious bugs; and at the same time, engineers were hobbled by a 
management structure which frequently overruled them on decisions that 
impacted release quality.

As I think someone else also mentioned, 2.5.1 is the first release that 
I recall having a good reputation for being reasonably stable at the time.