ABIT BP6 Motherboard explicitly supports FreeBSD

Wes Peters writes (via DaemonNews): " I bought an ABIT BP6 dual Celeron (socket 370) motherboard today, to work SMP projects with FreeBSD. While poking through the user manual, I was pleasantly surprised to find the following in section 1-5.

Dual Processor Knowledge You Should Know

For best performance, you should use an OS (Operating System) that supports multi-processors. The following OSes can support multi-processor functions: Microsoft Windows(R) NT (3.5x, 4.x and 5.x), SCO Unix, FreeBSD 3.0 or later, Linux, etc.

(emphasis added) This is the first specific mention of BSD I've seen in a PC hardware manual. This board comes strongly recommended."

Comments

Re:ABIT BP6, SMP, and OS

[Guy Harris]

Ever talk to Larry McVoy (chief architect behind SunOS 4

Nope. SunOS 4.0 shipped before Larry joined Sun (Larry joined either just before I left, or after I left); I'm not sure there's any one person who could be called a "chief architect behind SunOS 4" - if you consider the new VM system to have been the biggest change in SunOS 4.0, then the main people involved in the design and implementation of it were Bill Shannon, Rob Gingell, and Joe Moran, as I remember.

Larry did stuff for SunOS 4.1[.x], such as the pseudo-extent stuff in the 4.1[.x] file system, and was, I think, the person one might consider the architect of the SPARCcluster-1 system.

Tekram also says that it supports FreeBSD

[mat]

ABit is not the only computer manufacturer to annonce explicitly the support of FreeBSD : when I bought my Tekram SCSI (DC390 or something like that) FreeBSD and Linux were listed in the list of suported OS in the box.
Will the logos BSD or Linux will replace yesterday's Novell logos on network cards ?

Re:i love my bp6

[Zach Garner]

This was posted on mailing.freebsd.chat and crossposted to a number of other newsgroups.
"Ours" in this case refers to FreeBSD and "Theirs" refers to Linux (note the date):
--------------
On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Brad Knowles wrote:
> See some of Matt Dillon's comments regarding Linux. Our memory
>management scheme beats the crap out of theirs, although their SMP is
>ahead of ours.
--------------

There are a number of other posts similar to that (the majority being in freebsd related newsgroups). Also from my (usually bad) memory, FreeBSD only supports 2 CPU's while linux supports 4 (although, i think, more are supposedly possible on both). I'm also pretty sure that Linux has supported SMP longer than FreeBSD (which only had it starting with 3.0)

There was a link on some website i saw recently claiming that FreeBSD was ~20% faster with SMP. The link to the benchmark was broken, though.

Without benchmarks, i tend not to belive either one. Unless you are running a server or doing some serious rendering or cracking, it probably will not make THAT much of a difference.

And of course, i must mention 1) FreeBSD 4.0 is coming out soon, and SMP i would assume has been improved and 2) ftp.cdrom.com is running off of a dual Xeon running FreeBSD.

:wq

Re:i love my bp6

[mikfire]

Actually, FreeBSD has supported more than two CPUs for a while ( somewhere shortly after 3.0 was released according to my frequently-bad memory ).

The reason Linux's SMP code is better than FreeBSDs is that FreeBSD has this thing called the Giant Kernel Lock.

When running SMP, any process that needs to access the kernel employs the GKL, which prevents every other process from accessing any portion of the kernel.

Linux has no such problem. SMP in Linux is likely going to be better for a while - there are a lot of very nasty problems that need to be solved before FreeBSD can remove GKL.

If you really want to know more about this, search the archives for either GKL or Giant Kernel Lock in either the FreeBSD-Current or FreeBSD-SMP mailing lists.

Mik