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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!MathWorks.Com!panix!not-for-mail From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: Dual/Quad Pentium servers Date: 28 Sep 1994 03:26:15 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC Lines: 41 Message-ID: <36b5qn$mv4@panix2.panix.com> References: <Robert-CCN.jrfq@sacbbx.com> <35igq3$2no@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> <35kbrn$s2k@qualcomm.com> <35tsdq$bbb@engnews2.eng.sun.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix2.panix.com In article <35tsdq$bbb@engnews2.eng.sun.com>, Jack F. Vogel <jackv@orpheus.Eng.Sun.COM> wrote: >In article <35kbrn$s2k@qualcomm.com> bri@qualcomm.com (Brian Ellis) writes: >|Jack F. Vogel <jackv@orpheus.Eng.Sun.COM> wrote: >| >|>The answer is unfortunately NO, NONE of the free BSD variants will >|>run MP. Of course I don't know the hardware, but I owuld guess that >|>it will RUN on the machine, it just won't initialize or do anything >|>with the other CPUs. >|> >|>As someone who has worked on a couple of MP kernels, if someone >|>wants to donate an MP motherboard (I will even foot the bill for >|>the CPUs :-), I would LOVE to work on MP extensions to FreeBSD :-). > >|Jack, if you mean you've worked on the Solaris kernel, then I'm sure >|you know how drastically the kernel had to be re-engineered to go >|from SunOS 4.x. Frankly, I don't think the *BSD kernels could ever >|be made to run reliably on a symetric multiprocessing platform. Oh, boy, does Solbourne ever have a bone to pick with you... :-) >So the type of MP kernel I've worked on may have been more coarsely >grained, but the advantage is this approach is its MUCH easier to >implement based on a kernel that starts UP (like *BSD). That's >why I think it would be FUN to get a coarsely-grained X86 system >running. In fact with the primitives from Mach in FreeBSD and/or >NetBSD it shouldn't be hard to get something finer grained >running without much difficulty. Besides, OS/MP is a lot less coarsely grained than SunOS 4.1.3, and it's SunOS 4-based. So we have empirical evidence that it's not impossible to reliably make a BSD (well, mostly) kernel do finely-grained SMP. Even DEC did SMP with a 4.2BSD (gack!) kernel. Of course, they had some nasty performance problems, but a lot of that was hardware, and one has to keep in mind also that, well, they're DEC. :-) -- Thor Lancelot Simon tls@panix.COM - What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who - - once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses. --John Irving -