4 ms·

I think the idea is that Sun is the technical steward for the project and it's worth supporting Sun (via Solaris) to continue to fund efforts to create tools of

by iigs 17y ago

I think the idea is that Sun is the technical steward for the project and it's worth supporting Sun (via Solaris) to continue to fund efforts to create tools of these types. I don't believe the idea is "I need a platform with great debugging so I pester my management to get me a Sun to keep around". I don't know that I agree, but I believe that's the rationale.

tptacek 17y ago
So that makes perfect sense, but it's not the argument I'm engaging; people really do seem to think DTrace is a killer feature for Solaris.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Well... I find SPARC and ZFS much cooler.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    It was my impression that SPARC, as an instruction set architecture, has been somewhat discredited.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      While not an instruction-set feature, I find the register windows thing very interesting.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        Interesting and wrong-headed: the idea was both to optimize the architecture for C functional calls and to allow the processor to "scale" (hence the name) by adding to the register file without breaking the ABI (which you'd have to do to, say, add an %EFX register to x86). But: call stack depth on modern programs pushed register performance up against L1 cache performance for the C stack, and SPARC's convolution register spill/fill seems to have been a liability. More importantly, adding registers has not over the last decade been the primary mechanism by which processor speed is "scaled". There are hardware people here that could articulate this more accurately and correctly than me; I've got some SPARC assembly game, but I'm not a hardware design guy. But when I say the ISA has been discredited, I'm talking about things like register windows.
        rbanffy 17y ago
        I would love to hear from the hardware guys why SPARC ISA is such a bad idea.
        tptacek 17y ago
        Here's a decent comp.arch post making the same point (more precisely and accurately than me, but still pretty casually): http://yarchive.net/comp/register_windows.html http://yarchive.net/comp/register_windows.html

by iigs 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago

So that makes perfect sense, but it's not the argument I'm engaging; people really do seem to think DTrace is a killer feature for Solaris.

rbanffy 17y ago
Well... I find SPARC and ZFS much cooler.
- tptacek 17y ago
  It was my impression that SPARC, as an instruction set architecture, has been somewhat discredited.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    While not an instruction-set feature, I find the register windows thing very interesting.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Interesting and wrong-headed: the idea was both to optimize the architecture for C functional calls and to allow the processor to "scale" (hence the name) by adding to the register file without breaking the ABI (which you'd have to do to, say, add an %EFX register to x86). But: call stack depth on modern programs pushed register performance up against L1 cache performance for the C stack, and SPARC's convolution register spill/fill seems to have been a liability. More importantly, adding registers has not over the last decade been the primary mechanism by which processor speed is "scaled". There are hardware people here that could articulate this more accurately and correctly than me; I've got some SPARC assembly game, but I'm not a hardware design guy. But when I say the ISA has been discredited, I'm talking about things like register windows.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        I would love to hear from the hardware guys why SPARC ISA is such a bad idea.
        tptacek 17y ago
        Here's a decent comp.arch post making the same point (more precisely and accurately than me, but still pretty casually): http://yarchive.net/comp/register_windows.html http://yarchive.net/comp/register_windows.html