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Date:      Fri, 31 Oct 2003 10:20:34 -0500 (EST)
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net>
Cc:        arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: HEADSUP: New i386 interrupt and SMP code..
Message-ID:  <XFMail.20031031102034.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20031030225346.GB5173@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu>

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On 30-Oct-2003 Brooks Davis wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 05:34:47PM -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
>> - The ACPI MADT table can be used to enumerate CPUs instead of
>>   the MP Table if ACPI is enabled.  This will add true HT support
>>   in that we will finally support the BIOS setting for HT.
> 
> Will there be an option to ignore the BIOS and do something like the
> current system?  I'm all for paying attention to the BIOS, but I've got
> over 75 Xeons in my cluster and if they have the wrong BIOS settings,
> this is going to hurt when we switch to 5.x.

It's actually not safe to ignore the BIOS.  We have one 750x based
system here at work that doesn't boot a 4.x kernel with HTT enabled
(the logical CPUs don't ack the IPI) unless HTT is also enabled in
the BIOS.

> Overall, I'm looking forward to this change.  The death of the SMP
> kernel is something I've been looking forward to for a long time.

It was a question asked of Jordan at the first Usenix BSD BoF I
attended back in 2000 in San Diego. :)

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/



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