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Date:      Tue, 22 Jun 1999 13:02:07 -0400 (EDT)
From:      "Robert S. Sciuk" <rob@ControlQ.com>
To:        Ian Grigg <iang@systemics.com>
Cc:        freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Multi processor support?
Message-ID:  <Pine.UW2.3.96.990622125532.10127E-100000@fatlady.controlq.com>
In-Reply-To: <199906221618.MAA15934@systemics.com>

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On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Ian Grigg wrote:

> 
> > > > Heh.  That wouldn't be very symmetric...
> > > 
> > > No, but having processor affinity would be quite nice.  There's
> > > nothing wrong with MP.  
> >
> > Processor affinity is more than nice.  Work I've done on large HP boxes
> > indicate that by putting producer/consumer processes on the same processor
> > one avoids a lot of cache coherency issues, and increases bandwidth
> > considerably.  Admittedly, this is not true of all applications, but
> > having the ability to have two or more processes share a processor can go
> > a long way towards tuning application performance.
> 
> Are you making the assumption that the two processes
> are sharing memory for IPC?  Or, maybe kernel threads?
> 
> If not, I don't understand how you improve cache coherency
> with separate data sets.
> 

I'm not sure that IP type socket IPC would be appreciably helped here
though it is possible that Unix _domain sockets_ may be implemented using
mapped memory -- I'm not sure about FreeBSD, but it is possible (likely?) 
Guess I could check the sources, but I don't have time right now ...

in the case of applications sharing mmap'ed memory ... certainly there is
a speedup on certain platforms. 

> > I would suggest an
> > ioctl or other API type interface, with a userland tool to assist ... 
> 
> But, I agree with the general context.  Processor affinity
> is nice, but should only be an option on top of SMP.  I'd
> rather have a good SMP than an MP any day.

I can't disagree 8-).

Cheers,
Rob.

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Robert S. Sciuk		1032 Howard Rd.	PO Box 6A	Ph:905 632-2466
Control-Q Research	Burlington, Ont. Canada		Fx:905 632-7417
rob@ControlQ.com	L7R 3X5				http://www.ControlQ.com



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