Even if CHOLMOD is easily the best sparse symmetric solver, it is notoriously not used by scipy.linalg.solve, though, because numpy/scipy developers are anti-copyleft fundamentalists and have chosen not to use this excellent code for merely ideological reasons... but this will not last: thanks to the copilot "filtering" described here, we can now recover a version of CHOLMOD unencumbered by the license that the author originaly distributed it under! O brave new world, that has such people in it!