During the development of UTS, Amdahl engineers redesigned the UNIX operating system for large systems such as mainframes. This work is nowhere more apparent than in the area of large system performance. In the A+Edition, Amdahl used this large system expertise to tune Solaris for extremely heavy multiuser workloads on the larger MP SPARC servers.
This section will describe some of the areas in which significant changes were made to the underlying kernel subsystems. All of these changes are completely transparent to the user except, of course, for the improved system performance.
This section will also explain the industry standard benchmarks that were used to measure the performance improvements of the A+Edition. As you will see, the A+Edition provides substantial performance improvements for the SPEC SDM benchmarks, which simulate heavy multiuser workloads typically found in commercial environments.
Multi-threading System Algorithms Improvements in Lock Granularity Scaling Kernel Algorithms Increasing Processor Cache Utilization STREAMS Enhancements Measuring System Performance
