At USENIX in 1997 I went to a talk by a young David S Miller and Miguel de Icaza on porting Linux to the Ultrasparc. That talk (regretfully unrecorded) more th

At USENIX in 1997 I went to a talk by a young David S Miller and Miguel de Icaza on porting Linux to the Ultrasparc. That talk (regretfully unrecorded) more than anything else convinced me that I had to work on Linux. Throughout the talk they showed Linux vs Solaris performance, and talked about their optimizations. It was lmbench (Larry McVoy the author was ex-Sun, which adds something) that, and by the end they beat Solaris on every result. Obviously this was impressive, but it's hard for me to clearly express how much this shook my assumptions about how to build good software. A bunch of students shouldn't have been able to beat Sun on their own hardware in anything!