ZDnet about Linux and Solaris.

A really interesting article written by Jason Perlow at ZDNet: Unixfication II. It´s an insightful article about the different ways to define scalability in the Linux and Unix community and about the effects an GPLv3 Solaris may have.

So these implementations have been tested, but they are not exactly what you would call mainstream systems. And if I’m not correct, you don’t currently see the level of geometric performance increases on Linux above 16 cores like you do with UNIX. The maturity in the Linux kernel for this level of enterprise performance and stability on this type of hardware just isn’t there yet.

The problem for Linux is, that systems with more than 16 cores are available soon (think about an Sun Fire 4600 with Quadcores) and will be quite common when AMD delivers a 12 core version of their processors. Think about other multicore procs. The announcement of UltraSPARC T2 sound on the hardware side relatively small. Dual Socket or Quad socket isn´t such a big numerical jump. For Solaris this developement means: Jumping from 64 to 128 respectively 256 strands to schedule. And we won´t stop there. The chance for Linux: Systems with more than 8 cores were out of reach for many developers, and systems with more than 32 cores even for many software developers. Now such machines are relatively cheap and within reach of a community backed by companies, and this may fuel the community effort to optimize Linux for larger SMP systems.