Ha -- isn't that ever the truth! When I came to Sun in 1996, Solaris was really good at only two things: scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing

Ha -- isn't that ever the truth! When I came to Sun in 1996, Solaris was really good at only two things: scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it. Morale wasn't necessarily high (the early history of Solaris had been brutal, and it had only been due to the budding success of 2.5 and UltraSPARC that engineers were beginning to feel forward-looking), and it took us several more years just to get the house in order. MDB came out of this period, as well as important primordial tooling like lockstat(1M). But as we were getting the OS to work as advertised, we had bigger ideas brewing. In Bonwick's case, it was ZFS, for me it was DTrace, for Tucker it was zones, for Casper it was least-priv, etc. I know that it looks like it was in response to Linux and/or as a result of the dot-com bust (and it's impossible to say to what degree these were contributing factors), but I can tell you that from the epicenter it felt much more like a natural evolution than a competitive response. That said, I know that the competition didn't hurt, and you're certainly right about Linux finally causing us to take small-systems performance and system call latency seriously!