From owner-freebsd-smp Sun Feb 17 7:16:25 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Received: from smtp.whitebarn.com (Spin.whitebarn.com [216.0.13.113]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F4DB37B404 for ; Sun, 17 Feb 2002 07:16:21 -0800 (PST) Received: from BGPBook.Com (Relent.Bob.whitebarn.com [216.0.13.50]) by smtp.whitebarn.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA66903; Sun, 17 Feb 2002 09:16:20 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from Bob@BGPBook.Com) Message-ID: <3C6FC943.8070807@BGPBook.Com> Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2002 09:16:19 -0600 From: Bob Van Valzah User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i386; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010726 Netscape6/6.1 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: FreeBSD-SMP Subject: Volunteering: Old fart with old CPUs Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I just got back from BSDCon where I heard several folks working on SMPng asking for volunteers. My "day job" prevents me doing things like writing code or doing serious debugging, but I think I might still be able to help the SMPng cause. (I actually did one of the early MP Unix implementations on Gould hardware back in 1983, but I haven't kept current.) So I guess you could say that I understand the problem space and I'm excited about what you're trying to do for 5.0, but I'm rusty. I haven't written a line of kernel code in over 10 years, so I'm thinking I might be most helpful on testing, benchmarking, or profiling work. I'm able to use ddb to help you figure out what's going on, but I probably can't help you figure out how to fix it. I'm not likely to have big chunks of time to work on SMPng, but I can probably muster a steady stream of small blocks of time. I have an old dual PII-233 box sitting around and I'd be glad to put it to work if that'd help in some way. (My experience in the past has been that older, slower machines sometimes shake out latent bugs that you don't hit on modern screamers.) I could probably do something like regular builds from -CURRENT and run various benchmarks or torture tests. I'd be happy to run regular benchmarks against 3.x, 4.x, other BSDs, Linux or whatever. Also, I think I could do a decent job of SMP "data mining" if that'd help. For example, I might be able to cobble together some tools to analyze lock counters or other statistics. I see "profiling is broken" on the known issues list. I might be able to tackle that, but don't want to bite off more that I can chew--esp. not for my first attempt. How badly broken is it? So I'm leaving myself open for suggestions here. Please let me know what'd be most helpful. I'll try to pitch in where I can. Thanks, Bob To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message