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Date:      Wed, 08 Jan 1997 18:27:50 -0400
From:      "Marc E. Fiuczynski" <mef@cs.washington.edu>
To:        smp@freebsd.org
Subject:   unusual question
Message-ID:  <32D41F66.3941@cs.washington.edu>

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Hi,

We've developed our own operating system called SPIN (which was designed
to be dynamically extensible by arbitrary users).  All of the poks
(plain old kernel services) are implemented by our OS (threads, all but
the lowest level of VM, dynamic linking and extensibility support) and
other services (such as filesystems, networking, a unix emulation
library) are implemented by extensions that are dynamically linked into
the kernel's virtual address space.  Virtual all of our system is
implemented in Modula-3.

The one thing that we didn't implement ourselves are device drivers for
the various i/o cards.  For the alpha workstation we borrow device
drivers from DEC OSF/1.  For the x86, well you guessed it, we borrowed
device drivers from FreeBSD 2.1.6.  In terms of device driver support we
use some of the files in i386/* and pci/* and of course various header
files.

We are now interested to run SPIN on multiprocs using our FreeBSD 2.1.6
driver base.  I'm curious which device drivers are affected by the SMP
code.  Could someone tell me which doc I should read to find out which
components of FreeBSD are in particular heavily modified for SMP
support.  My guess is some of the VM and locore stuff.  I heard mentions
of "APIC" and would appreciate if someone pointed me at the proper
documentation for that as well, as I have no clue what that is (though I
guess it is some board support for multiprocs).

For those of you curious about SPIN please take a look at
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/spin/www
you can also get there from my home page by following the SPIN link
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/mef

Finally, if you have any questions about SPIN please fell free to
contact me.

Marc


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<DT>Hi,&nbsp;</DT>

<DT>&nbsp;</DT>

<DT>We've developed our own operating system called SPIN&nbsp;(which was
designed to be dynamically extensible by arbitrary users).&nbsp; All of
the poks (plain old kernel services)&nbsp;are implemented by our OS (threads,
all but the lowest level of VM, dynamic linking and extensibility support)
and other services (such as filesystems, networking, a unix emulation library)
are implemented by extensions that are dynamically linked into the kernel's
virtual address space.&nbsp; Virtual all of our system is implemented in
Modula-3.</DT>

<DT>&nbsp;</DT>

<DT>The one thing that we didn't implement ourselves are device drivers
for the various i/o cards.&nbsp; For the alpha workstation we borrow device
drivers from DEC&nbsp;OSF/1.&nbsp; For the x86, well you guessed it, we
borrowed device drivers from FreeBSD 2.1.6.&nbsp; In terms of device driver
support we use some of the files in i386/* and pci/* and of course various
header files.</DT>

<DT>&nbsp;</DT>

<DT>We are now interested to run SPIN on multiprocs using our FreeBSD 2.1.6
driver base.&nbsp; I'm curious which device drivers are affected by the
SMP code.&nbsp; Could someone tell me which doc I should read to find out
which components of FreeBSD are in particular heavily modified for SMP
support.&nbsp; My guess is some of the VM and locore stuff.&nbsp; I heard
mentions of &quot;APIC&quot; and would appreciate if someone pointed me
at the proper documentation for that as well, as I have no clue what that
is (though I guess it is some board support for multiprocs).</DT>

<DT>&nbsp;</DT>

<DT>For those of you curious about SPIN please take a look at&nbsp;</DT>

<DT>http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/spin/www</DT>;

<DT>you can also get there from my home page by following the SPIN&nbsp;link</DT>

<DT>http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/mef</DT>;

<DT>&nbsp;</DT>

<DT>Finally, if you have any questions about SPIN&nbsp;please fell free
to contact me.</DT>

<DT>&nbsp;</DT>

<DT>Marc</DT>

<DT>&nbsp;</DT>

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