> it wasn't "dropped" after 2.1.  the solaris 2.1/x86 tree was competely
> separate from the tree for sparc.  they were more like random linux ports
> in this regard.  it was not until solaris 2.4 that they got the tree
> merged and were able to release again.  also note that 2.1/x86 came out
> only a very short time (weeks) before 2.2/sparc did.

I was not aware about the internals of Solaris 2.1/x86.  But they did
a great job merging the code on both platforms.  Hopefully, when they
release a patch it is available in both platforms at same time.

About Solaris 2.1/x86 as random linux ports... it looks like they
recovered that developing model in Solaris 8, but now in both x86
and SPARC platforms.   ;-)

How curious they call it "Linux" when they are providing a lot of Gnu/Linux
software (that most times is not required because Solaris has very nice
replacements for it) except the kernel itself!

> also, luke knows sunos 4, 5 and sparc hardware in general pretty well :-)

I do not doubt it!   :-)

Igor.
-- 
Igor Sobrado, UK34436 - sobrado@acm.org