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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."

6 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.

    1. Re:yawn by OrangeSpyderMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      call me crazy

      Ok, crazy guy. :-)

      I'll bite. I am currently running two SMP machines. Ok, one is for a DB server. Leave that one out of the question, it is actually underpowered for much of what it does, alas. I'm saving my pennies. The other however is my main desktop. It is not unecessarily powerful (2xPIII 600EB) compared to todays desktops systems, on the contrary, but I would never swap it for a single 1.2GHz (or even higher - a 2.8 P4 might get me thinking :-) ).

      The reason is simple. On my desktop I frequently have a number of concurrent processes running (Mozilla, compile, ogg player, a few ssh sessions and I might even fire up a game from time to time while I'm waiting for a compile to finish...). This kind of use shows what a boost "low-end" SMP can be - the system remains perfectly responsive way past loads that would have a similar "horse-power" single CPU system groaning - and that is very important for interactive desktop use. My box at the office is a single PIII 1 GHz, which should, on paper, hold its own quite well. It feels markedly more sluggish for desktop use.

      SMP systems are little more prone to "pissing competition" type purchases than say, GeForces and P4. I don't know many people who can actually use all the horsepower of modern systems on the desktop, be it under *BSD or Linux. As someone once said, todays desktops just "wait faster". At the moment at least I'd take a lesser CPU 2-way SMP system over a more powerful single CPU for my desktop anyday.

      --
      Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
  2. Port to OpenBSD soon perhaps? by moonboy · · Score: 3, Interesting



    I wonder if this means OpenBSD will soon have SMP capability? Anyone have any thoughts? Inside information?

    --

    Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
  3. netbsd and smp by rplacd · · Score: 4, Informative

    Note that while the i386 port just got SMP support, other ports have had it for a while. NetBSD/macppc got it in August, NetBSD/sparc got it over a year ago, etc.

  4. Re:Silly BSD question / Mac question by josepha48 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Hmm well sort of.. it actually is build on the mach kernel which was a fork of bsd way back when.

    Of course this is NET-BSD not BSD. FreeBSD I believe has had SMP support for a while now. FreeBSD is more like Darwin / Mac OS X than NetBSD. Also they are referring to the i386 which is way different from Mac which uses the motorola processor.

    NetBSD runs on just about all processors out there, does Mac OS X? No and neither does FreeBSD. That is what the whole NetBSD project is about. Mac OS X is about a pretty gui on the foundations of UNIX / BSD. Kinda about time someone did what Mac did, but then again about a year before Apple announced their plans of OS X I suggested that someone put a nice GUI on UNIX. Guess what. They listened and now everyone is really taking to Mac.

    --

    Only 'flamers' flame!

  5. Re:This can only be a good thing by MobyTurbo · · Score: 3, Informative
    Blockquoth the poster:
    Finally OpenBSD will ahve some straight up competition. For a long time it has been the most secure, and the only BSD with SMP support.

    Can't wait to see what FreeBSD does to top this!

    According to the official OpenBSD FAQ, OpenBSD does not have SMP. Either in -CURRENT (development branch) or in release form, though apparantly there is a group working on it. FreeBSD on the other hand will have an improved fine-grain implementation of SMP, in their upcoming 5.0 release, and already have a more primative version in the 4.x releases. It's really the reverse, OpenBSD is the only free *BSD *without* SMP being tested. I have no idea why you thought otherwise.