From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Sep 15 21:32:10 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4CDD316A41B for ; Sat, 15 Sep 2007 21:32:10 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Received: from weak.local (hub.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::36]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DD86313C465; Sat, 15 Sep 2007 21:32:08 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Message-ID: <46EC4F59.7070104@FreeBSD.org> Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 23:32:09 +0200 From: Kris Kennaway User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Macintosh/20070728) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: josh.carroll@gmail.com References: <26ddd1750709141351i3646e9bdg8d8b7e93461167f9@mail.gmail.com> <26ddd1750709151014x2112b022r9bcb999fbf1e7e49@mail.gmail.com> <46EC270A.3020100@FreeBSD.org> <8cb6106e0709151421h7bfdeb6fo7dc671820294e9c7@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <8cb6106e0709151421h7bfdeb6fo7dc671820294e9c7@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Maxim Khitrov , Aryeh Friedman , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Building a new workstation - dual or quad-core CPU for FreeBSD 7? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 21:32:10 -0000 Josh Carroll wrote: >> In general, if you are running a multi-process or multi-threaded >> workload, FreeBSD 7 will be able to make good use of 8 CPU cores. >> >> Over the past 2 years we have done extensive benchmarking and >> optimizations that have resulted in *huge* performance improvements on >> many common workloads on 8-core systems. FreeBSD 7 is now regularly >> outperforming Linux on the workloads we have compared. In the near >> future we will be widening our scope to 16 core systems as well as >> investigating more benchmarks as we find them. > > Isn't the default scheduler still 4BSD on -CURRENT? Is ULE considered > stable on SMP systems now, and does it really outperform 4BSD? If so, > will it be set as the default scheduler once 7.0 is released? Yes, 4BSD is still the default, although you definitely want to use ULE for performance reasons (NB: only on 7, dont use ULE on 6). I don't know whether the release engineers plan to change that default, but I will check. > The P965 chipset boards will support the Q6600 and many of them will > support Penryn when it comes out (the 45nm based true quad core Intel > CPU). I have an Asus P5B and a Q6600 running at 3.4 GHz on 6.2-RELEASE > and it screams (8:20 to build world with make -j8, for example). So > even 6.2 will take good advantage of the 4 cores, and I imagine it'll > only get better when 7.0 is released. I'd just avoid the bleeding edge > motherboards/chipsets. JFYI, buildworld is a really bad benchmark for testing SMP performance in general (on 4 cpus it is not too bad), because the makefiles are not written to efficiently parallelize builds on many CPUs, so large parts end up running with only a single make job at a time. Kris