From owner-freebsd-arch Thu Jan 10 15:21:52 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mail12.speakeasy.net (mail12.speakeasy.net [216.254.0.212]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F193C37B41D for ; Thu, 10 Jan 2002 15:21:41 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 14626 invoked from network); 10 Jan 2002 23:21:40 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO laptop.baldwin.cx) ([64.81.54.73]) (envelope-sender ) by mail12.speakeasy.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP for ; 10 Jan 2002 23:21:40 -0000 Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.4.0 on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <3C3E1C71.415334E2@mindspring.com> Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 15:21:06 -0800 (PST) From: John Baldwin To: Terry Lambert Subject: Re: Request for review: getcontext, setcontext, etc Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG, Archie Cobbs , Peter Wemm , Dan Eischen , Daniel Eischen , Alfred Perlstein , Kelly Yancey , Nate Williams Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 10-Jan-02 Terry Lambert wrote: >> Huh? Methinks Terry needs to make assume the world is just a *teeny* >> bit larger than his narrow-view. > > There are several real reasons for threading, and a lot of bogus > ones. The primary reason given these days is SMP scalability, > even though I don't see anyone carrying this to its logical > conclusion by interleaving seperate thread instructions to the > Pentium 4 processors, which reall do perform better than the > Pentium 3's, but only if you do that. Actually, there is some thought about that. If you allow multiple threads to run on a KSE then you can do this. >> Even simple statistics use FP math. You're implying that FPU should >> only be used by folks who have a real *NEED* for it, which is humerous >> considering you're the one who usually bangs on the drum to make FreeBSD >> useful for more folks. :) > > I think I lost that battle when it was decided that FreeBSD > straight off a CDROM distribution will no longer run on the > 386, which was an inevitability as soon as we started needing > to "harvet entropy" just to boot. Actually, no, it was mroe due to the 386 not having cmpxchgl and that making GENERIC use the slow version that disabled interrupts and what not was a rather large performance hit for all the 486's, Pentium, PPro's, PII's, P3's, P4's, K5's, K6's, K7's, etc. out there. You can still build a 386 kernel if you want. :) -- John Baldwin <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message