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Date:      Mon, 03 Nov 2003 11:29:43 -0500 (EST)
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Jeff Roberson <jroberson@chesapeake.net>
Cc:        arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: HEADSUP: New i386 interrupt and SMP code..
Message-ID:  <XFMail.20031103112943.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20031101190722.M10222-100000@mail.chesapeake.net>

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On 02-Nov-2003 Jeff Roberson wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, John Baldwin wrote:
> 
>> Coming very soon to a CVS tree near you are some very large changes to
>> the i386 interrupt and SMP code.  New features include:
>>
>> - Runtime selection of using the I/O APICs or the AT PICs to route
>>   interrupts.
>> - I/O APICs can be used in a UP kernel or on a UP system that
>>   supplies either an MP Table or ACPI APIC Table.
>> - An SMP kernel can run on a UP machine.  This means that SMP
>>   can now be enabled in GENERIC and the SMP kernel config can die.
> 
> The lock prefix is extremely expensive on the P4 systems that I have
> measured.  It makes lock cmpxchg 150 cycles vs 12.  On athlon this is not
> such a big deal since it goes to 25 cycles from 12.  We should measure the
> impact of compiling in the lock prefix on UP P4 systems before making this
> the default.
> 
> Otherwise, this all sounds good.

Note that one can always compile a custom kernel if one needs it for
a specific application, but that this will increase the amount of
out-of-box support for i386.  This has also been a requested feature
for quite a while now.

-- 

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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