Date: Tue, 06 May 1997 11:47:19 -0600 From: Steve Passe <smp@csn.net> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: steve@visint.co.uk (Stephen Roome), bruce@zuhause.mn.org, freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Where to start SMP? Message-ID: <199705061747.LAA07575@Ilsa.StevesCafe.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 06 May 1997 10:23:29 PDT." <199705061723.KAA18734@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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Hi,
> This is not necessarily to help you, specifically. It's to remove
> the curb for people wanting to beat on the SMP kernel and provide
> feedback information to the SMP coders without requiring a lot of
> hand-holding in trade for the (needed) feedback.
>
> One effect this should have is that an SMP kernel should be built
> for the snap's (whech gets it on the CDROM). This won't happen
> without an "SMP GENERIC config" of some kind.
I've avoided this thinking that it was unnecessary src bloat, but perhaps
I'll go ahead and add SMP to i386/conf.
---
> The SMP options also need to be runtime instead of compile time
> configurable, based on flags values which can be modified at boot
> configuration time. This would let a single SMP kernel work on all
> hardware, regardless of which options must be twiddled to get it to
> go. The alternative is multiple "SMP GENERIC" configurations -- not
> a likely event.
This would centainly be desirable. I need to think about the necessary changes
to the code to make it feasable. My first thoughts:
APIC_IO is going away as an option (it will be mandatory)
SMP_AUTOSTART will be easy.
NCPUS is probably the hardest, I think the compromise will be that
SMP.GENERIC will support up to 4 CPUs, beyond that will require a compile.
SMP_TIMER_NC will be easy to add as a boot time option. the better solution
is to write the code that looks for the timere INTs on both ICU and APIC
and programs accordingly.
I've never dealt with coding boot-time options, could someone point me towards
a good example in the syr/sys tree?
--
Steve Passe | powered by
smp@csn.net | Symmetric MultiProcessor FreeBSD
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