Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 13:13:07 -0600 From: Bob Van Valzah <Bob@Talarian.Com> To: smp@FreeBSD.Org Subject: Volunteering: Old fart with old CPUs Message-ID: <3C6D5DC3.6060108@Talarian.Com>
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I just got back from BSDCon where I heard several folks working on SMPng
asking for volunteers.
My "day job" prevents me doing things like writing code or doing serious
debugging, but I think I might still be able to help the SMPng cause. (I
actually did one of the early MP Unix implementations on Gould hardware
back in 1983, but I haven't kept current.) So I guess you could say that
I understand the problem space and I'm excited about what you're trying
to do for 5.0, but I'm rusty.
I haven't written a line of kernel code in over 10 years, so I'm
thinking I might be most helpful on testing, benchmarking, or profiling
work. I'm able to use ddb to help you figure out what's going on, but I
probably can't help you figure out how to fix it. I'm not likely to have
big chunks of time to work on SMPng, but I can probably muster a steady
stream of small blocks of time.
I have an old dual PII-233 box sitting around and I'd be glad to put it
to work if that'd help in some way. (My experience in the past has been
that older, slower machines sometimes shake out latent bugs that you
don't hit on modern screamers.)
I could probably do something like regular builds from -CURRENT and run
various benchmarks or torture tests. I'd be happy to run regular
benchmarks against 3.x, 4.x, other BSDs, Linux or whatever.
Also, I think I could do a decent job of SMP "data mining" if that'd
help. For example, I might be able to cobble together some tools to
analyze lock counters or other statistics.
I see "profiling is broken" on the known issues list. I might be able to
tackle that, but don't want to bite off more that I can chew--esp. not
for my first attempt. How badly broken is it?
So I'm leaving myself open for suggestions here. Please let me know
what'd be most helpful. I'll try to pitch in where I can.
Thanks,
Bob
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