From owner-freebsd-current Wed Dec 3 22:02:11 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id WAA24092 for current-outgoing; Wed, 3 Dec 1997 22:02:11 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current) Received: from zibbi.mikom.csir.co.za (zibbi.mikom.csir.co.za [146.64.24.58]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id WAA24082 for ; Wed, 3 Dec 1997 22:01:58 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jhay@zibbi.mikom.csir.co.za) Received: (from jhay@localhost) by zibbi.mikom.csir.co.za (8.8.8/8.8.7) id IAA19642; Thu, 4 Dec 1997 08:00:58 +0200 (SAT) From: John Hay Message-Id: <199712040600.IAA19642@zibbi.mikom.csir.co.za> Subject: Re: 3.0 -release ? In-Reply-To: <199712040132.SAA10469@Ilsa.StevesCafe.com> from Steve Passe at "Dec 3, 97 06:32:07 pm" To: smp@csn.net (Steve Passe) Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 08:00:58 +0200 (SAT) Cc: FreeBSD-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL32 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Perhaps I overstated the issue, I get up times of many weeks on my dual P6 > here that is used as a development system. Obviously many others are also > using SMP for real work. But the efficiency just isn't there yet. We > would bench very poorly against a good SMP system, and thats what needs > improvement b4 we go prime-time with SMP. What about smaller steps? Stabilize the current SMP code and make a release with it (3.0) and then put the next stuff (threaded kernel, removal of the single kernel lock, etc.) in a next release. That way we have shorter release cycles and more people can get exposed to the new features that is currently in -current. I mean, there is nothing that say our first SMP release should be the ultimate one, is there? And the -current SMP code (minus a little bug here and there maybe :-)) is already very usefull to people with processor intensive apps. (It made a huge difference on the ZA-UNINET news router/web proxy machines, which has been running it for 6+ months now.) Well just a thought. PS. It does seem that we find most of our bugs just after a release, so in that sense it would also be good to have shorter release cycles. :-))) John -- John Hay -- John.Hay@mikom.csir.co.za