Debugging SMP Code with UML

chromatic writes "It's easy to write code that works fine on single-processor systems but dies horribly on multi-processor boxes. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on a four- or eight-way system, you can use UML to emulate a multi-processor machine."

Comments

Not the final solution

[mrblah]

Unless I'm missing something, while I believe that the simulation of multiple CPUS could certainly help find certain kinds of bugs (like those provided as examples in the article), a lot of the nastier issues will only manifest themselves when you really have multiple CPUs that are really doing work at the same time. Folks that work with threads see this a lot: where a multi-threaded application works great on a single-cpu box; but on a multi-cpu box where those threads are really running at the same time, problems occur. So while this is a nice tool, I can't see releasing code for production that has never been tested on a machine that actually has multiple CPUs.