Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NetBSD-Current Gets SMP

Posted by timothy on from the build-a-bigger-box dept.

MobyTurbo writes "NetBSD-current for the i386 architecture now has SMP. (It used to be that only FreeBSD had this feature among the free BSDs.) See the announcement on the current-users mailing list."

1 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. yawn by honold · · Score: 4, Insightful

    call me crazy, but i could really care less about smp. i would wager the wide majority of smp systems fall into 2 categories:

    1) unnecessarily powerful servers
    2) unnecessarily powerful home braggart systems

    database servers? sure. heavily loaded web servers? sure. file servers? NO. desktops? NO.

    at least the scsi bigots will actually net some measurable performance increases if they drop some money on a 15k drive.

    i sincerely hope openbsd continues to focus on OTHER things like openssh - you know, that thing you probably use every day of your life on your non-smp machine?. since most openbsd boxes are used as edge devices, the only big need for processing horespower is in crypto...

    and that problem can be solved by purchasing a hifn-based pci crypto accellerator for $90 from soekris.com, thanks to openbsd's excellent hardware crypto accelerator support.

    once you get past the crotch-grabbing aspect, low-end smp is not what most of the world would have you believe it is. high-end smp will likely get replaced by clustering of commodity hardware.