alt Hacker News> IIRC, Solaris could deal with an unrecoverable ECC error by killing the process that had the bad memory. And I think they had hot swap memory on some systems.
Both of these are supported on Linux now. The kill-on-ECC is handled by hwpoison: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.1/vm/hwpoison.html and the hot-swappable RAM has been present for quite a bit longer.
I saw references to Linux support for hotswappable ram a long time ago, but I've yet to run into a commodity server that supports it. And honestly, I've yet to run a system that needed it nor did I have systems where are hard stop from an unrecoverable ECC error was a problem.
I'm not terribly surprised that Linux grew support for poisoning pages eventually (and I appreciate the link!), but I believe Solaris had memory retirement in Solaris 10 (2005), and Linux got page poisoning in 2009. If you were running workloads where it would be important, then Solaris was better for you at that time, unlike the claim from the poster above that
> once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.
I think only a curmudgeon would claim Linux wasn't stable in 2005. Although certainly the userland could use less churn. :P