From owner-freebsd-arch Mon Oct 7 10:40:31 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 90BDA37B404 for ; Mon, 7 Oct 2002 10:39:14 -0700 (PDT) Received: from web11207.mail.yahoo.com (web11207.mail.yahoo.com [216.136.131.189]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4079E43E65 for ; Mon, 7 Oct 2002 10:39:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from gathorpe79@yahoo.com) Message-ID: <20021007173913.50425.qmail@web11207.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [149.99.116.61] by web11207.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Mon, 07 Oct 2002 13:39:13 EDT Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 13:39:13 -0400 (EDT) From: Gary Thorpe Subject: Re: Running independent kernel instances on dual-Xeon/E7500 system To: Terry Lambert Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <3DA10949.218488B9@mindspring.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii 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 --- Terry Lambert wrote: > Nate Lawson wrote: > > My dismissiveness was due to anticipating the > direction this was going, > > which is nicely shown by the response below. In > short, dedicated > > processors for IO were used in the minicomputer > days but are wasteful > > nowadays when you have lightweight interrupts > and/or polling when > > appropriate. > > Yet, I keep running into employers who want to pay > people to do > exactly that, particularly for offloading network > processing to > one processor, and running applications on the > other. Wouldn't this be "solved" by using thread affinity? > > And then there's the Tigon II firmware rewrite for > FreeBSD, to > offload interrupt and copy processing. And CGD's > work for Sibytes > (NetBSD 64bit MIPS-based network coprocessor board) > doing just that > got the company sold to Broadcom for what, $700M? > > 8-). > > > > If your scheduler sucks, fix it. If a device > needs extra processing > > equivalent to another N Ghz CPU, the vendor will > add silicon. The "S" in > > SMP is for symmetric, lest we forget. > > People keep saying that, and then keep not running > interrupts in > virtual wire mode, so that their delivery is "S" as > in "symmetric"... > ;^). > > Actually, NT proved that wiring particular > interrupts to particular > processors was the way to go -- that was one of the > things they did > to beat the Linux numbers in both the Netcraft and > Ziff-Davis > benchmarks... perfect symmetry isn't all that it's > promised. > > -- Terry I remember when I mentioned that some time ago and got the general response that this setup is highly specialized, inflexible, and probably not very useful for a real-world server. People did point of that with MORE cpus and/or MORE network adapters or some combinations that is not n:n ratio, NT would not have scaled well at all. How would NT compare to Tru64, Solaris, AIX, or IRIX in a similar test? Do any of these "hardwire" interrupts to particular cpus? I think what the original poster would want is something like user-mode linux or vmware. Aside from machine emulation (via bochs and simular simulators), does anything exist for FreeBSD which would allow you to run seperate, independent environments? ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message