*BSD News Article 53440


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From: gary@palmer.demon.co.uk (Gary Palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: (no subject)
Date: 24 Oct 1995 23:05:23 +0100
Organization: none
Lines: 25
Message-ID: <46jnv3$560@palmer.demon.co.uk>
References: <4692ub$l4t@nova.avid.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: pc.my.org
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: palmer.demon.co.uk

In article <4692ub$l4t@nova.avid.com>,
Perry Kivolowitz  <perry_kivolowitz@avid.com> wrote:

Hi

>Does FreeBSD have any provisions for multi-processing (SMP or AMP?)

No. Not >YET<

>If there isn't...has anyone given any thought to how this might be 
>added? And, is there interest in discussing this privately?

Yes. Probably, but not with me :-)

The foundation work for SMP has been done, and a couple of FreeBSD boxes
have successfully run multi-user setups with the SMP code enabled, but
it requires a lot more work before it'll be integrated into the
FreeBSD source tree and made generally available. (Basically the kernel
locking systems need to be refined. I believe that there is (or was)
one big lock on the entire kernel, so only one processor could be in
the kernel at once. That needs to be refined down to much finer grained
locks before it'll be truly useful).

Gary