[luckydude]

The 100Gb pipe article was off the front page and not really commented on that much. I see post after post about containers this and vagrant that, all sorts of posts about stuff that I find pretty uninteresting. Something as remarkable as the 100Gbit thing gets a little attention but it is clear that it's not that interesting to the majority of the people here.

I'm just depressed that real low level systems stuff seems to be not sexy any more. When I was at Sun the kernel group was the unchallenged top of the heap, it was the place to be. When I was fixing source management at Sun (as a hobby, it wasn't my official job) they asked me to go work in the tools group. Are you frigging kidding me? Noone in their right mind would leave the kernel group for the tools group. Sorry to be snooty but that just wasn't a thing.

I just got back from a FreeBSD conference at Netflix and was asking about the state of the world and it's depressing. People don't seem to write solid papers like they used to. Sun produced papers on vnodes, the VM system architecture and implementation, Sparc, I wrote one on making UFS perform like an extent based file system. Who is doing that now? I looked in the usual conference proceedings and it was full of academic stuff, not very interesting stuff, but no industry stuff.

[sliken]

I think that must have been common. Nobody good worked in tools. I managed a couple sunos and later solaris boxes. Userspace was a disaster. I ended up replacing it all with GNU and every piece I installed had a warning. Don't use Solaris make. Don't use solaris tar. Don't use the solaris compiler, etc. Ended up having to install gcc from binaries, then build zip, make, etc. Even tail (max 10k lines) and awk (max 16 columns or something) had issues. While debugging even xterm would die if you made it too wide.

Once you replaced the userspace with GNU + X11 the kernel was solid, although SunOS and early solaris didn't multitask well. For some workloads I'd end up disabling all but one CPU.

[luckydude]

So I believe you on the Solaris userspace, it was full of System 5 garbage. GNU was a much better answer.

But on SunOS 4.x, you had userspace problems? That was a pretty stock BSD userspace with a lot of bugfixes. Every open source makefile in the world just worked when you typed make on SunOS. Seemed pretty solid to me, I think the only thing I would do is add perl, it took Sun a long time to decide to include perl (if they ever did).