Date: Fri, 09 May 1997 23:00:10 -0700 From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@mat.net> Cc: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>, Steve Passe <smp@csn.net>, james@westongold.com, smp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: maptable of SuperMicro P6DNH Message-ID: <199705100600.XAA15693@MindBender.serv.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 09 May 97 21:11:14 -0400. <Pine.BSF.3.91.970509210708.18685s-100000@Journey2.mat.net>
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>> > I don't see it happening. There are major differences in the hardware on
>> > an SMP motherboard and a UP motherboard. The software differences are much
>> > more than just locking. A completely different INTerrupt sub-system is in
[...]
>> Seriously, the MP boards are typically *better* than the UP boards
>> because they have more hurdles. The UP boards *should* jump the same
>> hurdles -- it would make for faster UP boards, for one thing, and
>> faster generic OS code, for another. I'm surprised there isn't a
>> push for this from MS on the basis of NT... heck, maybe there is?
And it would make the hardware more expensive. And people wouldn't
buy it. Then you would have SCSI and IDE in motherboard designs.
>I don't know for sure, but I right now suspect FreeBSD is considerably
>ahead of MS in terms of stability on MP. I had to have a MS Windows
>environment this last semester, for an OS project I had to do. I tried
>installing NT on my SMP platform, which runs FreeBSD-SMP just ducky.
>Results were not good, it kept on panicing on install.
Uh, I don't think so, Tim.
I suspect you had a motherboard that simply wasn't supported. NT was
designed from the very first byte of code to support SMP. NT's SMP is
considerably finer-grained, more stable and mature than FreeBSD's.
(Not to knock FreeBSD -- the SMP guys are doing good work, but... it
has a ways to go.)
I suspect you simply had a motherboard that wasn't supported.
Microsoft releases a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that works for
motherboards that support it, which is the big mainstream guys.
Probably the stuff that is _strictly_ adherent to the Intel MP specs
(though have no inside knowledge of the criteria). If a vendor has
hardware that doesn't support the generic SMP HAL, they have to
provide their own (which many vendors have done).
Windows NT isn't Windows 95. Nobody gets upset if Windows 95 crashes
every now and then. Believe me, _any_ crash and the NT guys are all
over it. They take stability serious as a heart attack (to abuse a
tired old cliche).
I had them trying to get me to reproduce a crashing condition on my
machine at home, so they could get a crash dump to analyze. I
couldn't reproduce it. A friend of mine bought a <name deleted> SMP
machine to run NT on. He couldn't get NT to boot on that either,
without falling over shortly after booting. He had one of the top
developers in the NT division at his house analyzing crash dumps.
They concluded that the vendor had done something fishy in their
motherboard, and were trying to work it out with them.
I would suspect the many hundreds of multi-processor Intel and Alpha
servers all over Microsoft, that simply run for many hundreds of days
(similar to any large Unix shop) give testament to this fact.
Please be serious. A multi-billion-dollar multi-national company,
with some of the brightest software engineers in the industry is
betting its future on NT. You think FreeBSD's SMP is better?
I'm not trying to knock FreeBSD -- obviously I've been a raving BSD
advocate for years. And I've been intending to pick up a used MP
machine or motherboard for some time, just so I can play with FreeBSD
SMP on it. And obviously there are many things about NT that are not
popular in this forum. However, sometimes we all need to step back,
and take a reality check, before diving into our passion.
Hey, hate Microsoft all you want. Just realize that your hatred
doesn't automatically mean that Microsoft is full of incompetent
idiots. When they want to right good software, they have written some
very very good software.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
--< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >--
NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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