Re: Ressurecting an IPX

" Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 06:59:33 +1100 (EST)
" From: Craig Dewick <[email protected]>
" 
" As a side-note, I still have a Solbourne 5/502 system which has a 2 gb HD 
" with OS/MP 1.something (derived from SunOS 4.1.3 or 4.1.4 I believe)

yup.  iirc 1b = 4.1.2, 1c = 4.1.3, there was no 1d.

" on it. A true multi-processor/multi-tasking version of SunOS 4! Shame about 
" the company disappearing into the ether when Northrop-Grumman got hold of 
" it. And sourcing spare hardware, etc. is another one of those holy-grail 
" type searches.

indeed!  my only experience of solbourne systems came just at the time
grumman was taking over, and i heard of a bunch o' good things that
just got landfilled - like the extended backplane with enough slots
for max ram -and- max cpus...  i thought at the time that they were
missing a bet in not porting the solbourne mp changes to sunos over to
sun-std sun4m system arch, but perhaps there were demarcation or
non-compete clauses...  later at another place, i ran 4.1.4 on
dual-supersparc ss20s and found it ran excellently, but its mp tech
originated with ross for their hypersparc cpus and worked crudely by
basically putting a spinlock around the whole kernel.  [this was just
as well for us, as we had one big honking single-threaded app that
sucked up all the cpu cycles; giving it its own cpu meant engineers
could continue working on other tasks - like setting up for the next
run of the app]  solbourne mp reworked the kernel more extensively
with finer-grained spinlocks.

our solbourne was something of a problem child and constantly had
problems.  i got to know the fe pretty well that summer...
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
[email protected]                       and think what none thought