From owner-freebsd-smp Wed Jun 21 1:11:19 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Received: from magnesium.net (toxic.magnesium.net [207.154.84.15]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id F204C37BD04 for ; Wed, 21 Jun 2000 01:11:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jasone@magnesium.net) Received: (qmail 93476 invoked by uid 1142); 21 Jun 2000 08:11:14 -0000 Date: 21 Jun 2000 01:11:14 -0700 Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 01:11:10 -0700 From: Jason Evans To: Matthew Dillon Cc: Matthew Jacob , freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SMP discussion moving to freebsd-smp Message-ID: <20000621011110.H233@blitz.canonware.com> References: <200006210729.AAA91264@apollo.backplane.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0.1i In-Reply-To: <200006210729.AAA91264@apollo.backplane.com>; from dillon@apollo.backplane.com on Wed, Jun 21, 2000 at 12:29:43AM -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wed, Jun 21, 2000 at 12:29:43AM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote: > :I offered you an alpha last week, remember? > > Yes, and I said that I *DIDN'T HAVE TIME*. > > Guys, I'm working 60 hour weeks in my new startup. I don't have the > time to learn Alpha assembly, and I don't have time to double-code > all the machine dependant pieces even if I *did* know Alpha assembly. > > It's that simple. My problem is not hardware... I could buy as much > hardware as I wanted from what I got out of BEST. It's time that's > the problem. There are a couple of issues that need to be resolved here. Matt (Dillon), you've made it clear that you don't have the time/background/desire to do the alpha bits. That is totally acceptable; your work is valuable even without the alpha bits. The other issue has to do with how we are going to approach the SMP work with regard to the alpha port. We must keep the i386 and alpha ports more or less in sync, because this is such a wide-sweeping change to the kernel. Since we have different people doing the machine-dependent work for i386 and alpha, this is going to require some communication to get the bits ready for committing in approximately the same timeframe. Working on both i386 and alpha will probably mean that our first couple of stages will take a bit longer, but we cannot afford to leave alpha in the dust right off the bat. This might cost us a couple of weeks up front, but I think it is well worth the effort, and may more than pay off in the long run if it avoids having to do re-work to factor out machine-dependent portions of the work. Jason To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message