Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sun, 06 Apr 1997 01:26:50 +0800
From:      Peter Wemm <peter@spinner.dialix.com>
To:        "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@freebsd.org>
Cc:        cr@jcmax.com (Cyrus Rahman), smp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Questions about mp_lock 
Message-ID:  <199704051726.BAA18615@spinner.DIALix.COM>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 05 Apr 1997 12:13:41 EST." <12968.860260421@orion.webspan.net> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
"Gary Palmer" wrote:
> Peter Wemm wrote in message ID
> <199704051704.BAA18422@spinner.DIALix.COM>:
> > Moving the kernel locking up a layer and having a seperate entry/exit lock
> > in the trap/syscall/interupt area would be a major win without too much
> > cost.  What we'd gain by that would be that we could then gradually move 
> > to a per-subsystem locking system perhaps based initially on which syscall 
> > or trap type.  It'd be quite possible to have one cpu in the kernel doing 
> > IP checksumming on a packet, another in the vfs system somewhere, another 
> > doing some copy-on-write page copies in the vm system and so on.  Things 
> > like getpid() would need no locking whatsoever.  But that's for later once 
> > the basics are working.
> 
> Question if you would: define`basics'?

Umm, things like having it understand the pci bus in apic mode on new 
machines without having to tweak the code, or having IPI's sent to evict 
processes from other cpu's when the trying to give it a kill -9, having 
the system boot into multi-cpu mode without sysctl, being able to build 
world with /sys pointing to the smp tree, having per-cpu scratch space, 
and a zillion other things that would be nice.  Oh, and having a working 
smp-capable lock manager would be nice too. :-)

> Thanks,
> 
> Gary
> --
> Gary Palmer                                          FreeBSD Core Team Member
> FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info

Cheers,
-Peter





Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199704051726.BAA18615>