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A comment on When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux. Parent comment

Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by bcrl on Friday January 08, 2021 @08:59PM (#25695208)
We (the Linux kernel community) put a lot of work into scalability back then. One time we delayed a Red Hat release several weeks due to a persistent bit flip on an NFS filesystem on one of our stress tests that we thought was a kernel bug. It ultimately turned out to be a broken Cisco switch that was happily fixing up the CRC and checksums on the NFS packets it was bit flipping.
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Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by blinkingled on Friday January 08, 2021 @09:26PM (#25695557)
Of course. Sun was ahead of the curve in OS scalability and SMP hardware departments and for some time Solaris was still the best OS to run databases and Java.
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Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by throw0101a on Friday January 08, 2021 @10:12PM (#25696040)
The SPARCcenter 2000 had 20 sockets in 1992:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun4d#SPARCcenter_2000

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation

The Cray CS6400 had 64 in 1993:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_CS6400

SunOS 4.1.4 was released in 1994 and SunOS 5.x ("Solaris 2") started in 1992.

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Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by h2odragon on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:13AM (#25698251)
The Sparc2k was a beast. I got on in 1998 that (among other tasks) ran the IRC bot for our channel with a 4gb text quotes database to chain off of. ("Shut up, lucy"). It usually ran at a load average of 4 to 12 per CPU. I had just over 1TB of disk array on it; in 4 dozen, full height, 5 inch 23GB SCSI drives.

I sank about $10k into that system in ebay parts. at the time there just wasn't any way to get such bandwidth out of x86, but used gear was cheap. if you could afford the time, sweat and blood to keep it running.

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Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by bcrl on Friday January 08, 2021 @09:35PM (#25695655)
Sun also made some pretty awesome x86 servers. It's sad that so many of the vendors left standing today have such crappy IPMI implementations.
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Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by Bluecobra on Friday January 08, 2021 @09:55PM (#25695835)
I used to work at a shop that had hundreds of X4100's running x86 Solaris 10. It was a pleasure to work those hosts. Solaris had some really cool stuff like ZFS, dtrace, Zones/Containers, SMF, etc.
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Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by yetanotherme on Saturday January 09, 2021 @07:14AM (#25699729)
And now you read the release notes with dread as you witness more and more functionality being dropped because they choose not to maintain it. Luckily there is FreeBSD
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Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by Bluecobra on Saturday January 09, 2021 @12:28PM (#25702295)
Yeah it’s a shame. If Sun would have made Solaris (both SPARC/x86) free sooner, they might have prevented the mass exodus of companies moving off to save money.
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Re:When Amazon Switched from Sun to Linux by jabl on Saturday January 09, 2021 @05:02PM (#25705322)
In retrospect, they should have gone down the Sun386I path back in the day, instead of changing gears and spending $$$ building up the SPARC architecture and ecosystem.
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