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> All this stuff was pretty interesting to me so when OpenSolaris was released later, I had to take a look and see what they did. And it was a big clunky lookin

> All this stuff was pretty interesting to me so when OpenSolaris was released later, I had to take a look and see what they did. And it was a big clunky looking thing. SunOS was running on 20 processor (née core) systems as early as 1993: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun4d#SPARCcenter_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun4d#SPARCcenter_2000 * https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/289692 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/289692 * https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1731798/Sun-Microsystems-Sparccenter-2000.html https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1731798/Sun-Microsystems-S... So I'm curious to know if there was any refactoring at some point, or whether this was 'just' the best that could be done when they first wrote it, and then they left/were stuck with it. Certainly Linux would have had the advantage of more years of research when it finally got around to solving the same problem.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
I'm not sure, not having any experience of proprietary OS development. I could guess. The technology was not an insignificant thing (RCU as mentioned). Possibly more important was that Linux didn't have such a pressing need to scale up, whereas for Solaris they were a hardware company that made these big systems so they had to get it working at all costs. Linux's main market was 1 CPU systems for a long time, and there was strong push back against complexity or slowdowns caused by scalability improvements so the bar for them was very high.