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Jordan Hubbard Interviewed On OPN's #FreeBSD

Posted by timothy on from the on-air-jordan dept.

flynn_nrg writes: "As a lot of you already know, an interview with Jordan was held Sunday January 27 at 10:30 PM EST. The log of the interview has been posted in bsdvault.net. The complete text of our question and answer session with Jordan Hubbard can be found here. Jordan was mainly asked about his work at Apple and SMPng, the new SMP code that will debut on 5.0. Enjoy ..."

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  1. More on the scheduler changes by Roger+Watson · · Score: 2, Informative
    the scheduler rewrite is about to hit its first major milestone with KSE 3, which will be presented and discussed at BSDCon

    There's a bit of background here: currently FreeBSD has a much-maligned userland thread scheduler, typically used to handle pthreads and other rightful divisions of a process. It also uses a simple round-robin kernel scheduler to handle "heavy" processes. KSE 3, OTOH, will support many new features:

    • LWP support for both user and kernel threads. This is similar to the implementation in Solaris, which has an extraordinarily well-written scheduler.
    • More progress has been made toward a fully pre-emptable kernel, which will be very useful on large SMP systems.
    • Real-time scheduling (as in QNX and RTOS) will be supported, which should greatly improve performance on native video recording and playback software as well as games.
    • FIFO support will be added, as well as a more fine-grained way to set priorities.
    --rwatson