From owner-freebsd-smp Mon Feb 28 8:17:11 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Received: from kronos.alcnet.com (kronos.alcnet.com [63.69.28.22]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8848E37BA2C for ; Mon, 28 Feb 2000 08:17:07 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kbyanc@posi.net) X-Provider: ALC Communications, Inc. http://www.alcnet.com/ Received: from localhost (kbyanc@localhost) by kronos.alcnet.com (8.9.3/8.9.3/antispam) with ESMTP id LAA17188; Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:17:01 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:17:01 -0500 (EST) From: Kelly Yancey X-Sender: kbyanc@kronos.alcnet.com To: Jim Mercer Cc: freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: current working SMP mboards? In-Reply-To: <20000228103056.I606@reptiles.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Jim Mercer wrote: > i'm considering the following for 3.4-STABLE (or 4.0-RELEASE): > ASUS (P2B-DS or P2L97-DS) > 512M RAM > 1 x scsi drive for OS/applications > 5 x 9/18 gig U2W drives under vinum raid5 for data I cannot personally comment on your hardware setup, but I recall others on -smp indicating success with the ASUS SMP motherboards. > > my understanding of the SMP stuff is that if the application is not > multi-threaded, then SMP doesn't do much. > If the application is multi-threaded, currently SMP doesn't do much. FreeBSD has user-land threads and the smallest kernel schedulable entities are processes, not threads. > my theory was that with a dual processor, each incantation of the application > would fire up on alternating processors. Assuming each application is it's own process, then you would be utilizing both CPUs. > > is this correct? or is SMP effectively useless unless my application > (primarily postgresql) is multi-threaded. > Your scenario should work precisely because, at least under current versions of FreeBSD, SMP is most effective in non-multi-threaded applications. Kelly -- Kelly Yancey - kbyanc@posi.net - Richmond, VA Analyst / E-business Development, Bell Industries http://www.bellind.com/ Maintainer, BSD Driver Database http://www.posi.net/freebsd/drivers/ Coordinator, Team FreeBSD http://www.posi.net/freebsd/Team-FreeBSD/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message