From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jun 6 17:24:11 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from patrocles.silby.com (d130.as26.nwbl0.wi.voyager.net [169.207.67.196]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E648D37B400; Thu, 6 Jun 2002 17:24:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from patrocles.silby.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by patrocles.silby.com (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id g570Nj9I004804; Thu, 6 Jun 2002 19:23:45 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from silby@silby.com) Received: from localhost (silby@localhost) by patrocles.silby.com (8.12.3/8.12.3/Submit) with ESMTP id g570NTn0004801; Thu, 6 Jun 2002 19:23:45 -0500 (CDT) X-Authentication-Warning: patrocles.silby.com: silby owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 19:23:29 -0500 (CDT) From: Mike Silbersack To: j mckitrick Cc: John Baldwin , Subject: Re: SMP/5.0 performance on single CPU? In-Reply-To: <20020607011035.B79818@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> Message-ID: <20020606191745.V3036-100000@patrocles.silby.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, j mckitrick wrote: > | almost all of the kernel. However, the SMP work is still in progress and > | it will get better as time goes on. One thing to note is that in 4.x, > > Well, I'm trying to decide if I should make the leap to 5.0 when it > comes out (my early adopter side talking) or wait around for a rev or 2 > (my -stable side talking). I'm leaning toward waiting, since I depend > on my system for so much (it's my only box) and I also don't think I > have the time to learn the new details of 5.0 just yet. > > Thanks for the comments, John. > > NOTE: Please CC me, as I am not currently subscribed. Thanks. > > jm To be honest, I don't think that SMP threading should be a consideration for anyone when 5.0-release rolls around. Yes, once it's fully fleshed out it will be a nice performance gain for SMP users. At the same time, I doubt that it will be much of slowdown for UP users, and I don't think that it will be any slower than 4.x SMP. On the other hand, there are numerous new features (GEOM, TrustedBSD, OpenPAM, Snapshots + background fsck, etc) being implemented in 5.x that will never be MFC'd to 4.x due to their complexity. These features (and whathever other ones pop up) are the ones you should evaulate the usefulness of 5.0 with. If none of the features are that useful to you, then by all means stick with 4.7 or whatever we're up to when 5.0-release comes out. I'm sure that the 4.x branch will continue to exist for a long while, and that you'll have plenty of company there. In reality, we don't know what 5.0 will look like come November. If you'd asked me back in January, I would have had a very pessimistic outlook. However, much work has been done in the last two months; if work continues at this rate, 5.0 will have significant advantages for many people. Mike "Silby" Silbersack To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message