Since I have been able to find an intelligent posting in this thread,
I will respond to it and explain what I can as chief architect of the
SparcLinux port.
The main points of interest are:
1) Solaris's networking stack, in all of it's incantations (one breed
of it was the Lochman code in 2.0, 2.1 and early 2.2 releases, then
it was rewritten by another company for 2.3 onward) is SVR4 streams
based.
2) Linux is light weight, Solaris is a pig.
3) Every BSD and SVR4 based system today, except for Linux, has a very
broken System call mechanism.
4) Solaris cannot even do it's own optimizations correctly because
SunPRO is a broken compiler.
So my question always is, in matters such as these. Who are these
processor cycles for anyways, the kernel or the user? Think about
this when you consider how much overhead is being saved from one OS to
another, and to what scale this is occurring.
I hope that explains some of it, and gives people at least some sort
of idea of the kinds of things that makes Linux scream on just about
any hardware. If people would like more explainations like the above,
I'd be more than happy to chat with you via email about it or
similar. I love talking about performance issues on various
processors and systems.
Oh, and one thing that has not been mentioned yet in this thread (and
yes NetBSD/OpenBSD both have this as well, good work guys). That
SparcLinux kernel that gets all of this incredible performance runs on
both sun4c and sun4m machines. Sun Engineers way back when scratched
their heads for months and couldn't figure out a way to pull it off
(you need a seperate kernel image depending upon whether you are
running on a sun4m or a sun4c, for SunOS/Solaris). And on top of that
Linux obviously pulls it off efficiently.
One final note. When you have to deal with SunSOFT to report a bug,
how "important" do you have (ie. Fortune 500?) to be and how big of a
customer do you have to be (multi million dollar purchases?) to get
direct access to Sun's Engineers at Sun Quentin? With Linux, all you
have to do is send me or one of the other SparcLinux hackers an email
and we will attend to your bug in due time. We have too much pride in
our system to ignore you and not fix the bug.