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

[Toby Thain]

On 2016-12-06 9:32 PM, Andrew M Hoerter wrote:
> 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.

Some things never change.

--Toby

>
> 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.
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