Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

KSE Progress On FreeBSD SMP Environment

Posted by Hemos on from the threads-for-the-world dept.

Dan writes "This is a significant milestone to be shared with everyone! Khairil Yusof reports that libkse is now running quite well on his FreeBSD 5.1+ current based SMP system. He has tested a bunch of apps on his system, taking the approach of enabling kse one app at a time. He reports a current uptime of 23hrs with these apps running with libkse.so.1, and basically a usable Gnome 2.2 desktop environment. He says that with recent updates, you can now see the threads with top(8). Kernel Scheduler Entities (KSE), is a kernel-supported threading system similar in design to Scheduler Activations [Anderson, et. al.]. It strikes a balance between user-level (1:N) and kernel-level (1:1) threading models, giving most of the advantages of both, and few of the disadvantages of either."

5 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. More Power to you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is great, and advances all of the *BSDs if it works out.

  2. Testsuit and benchmark by rapiere · · Score: 5, Interesting

    KSE seems really an interesting implementation in FreeBSD as well as the process to integrate it in the kernel/userland.

    LIBMAP permits to cleanly test it on your system (5.1-RELEASE or -CURRENT) one application at a time (you redefine libraries linking per application). I've tried it with mozilla 1.4b for more than a week now without any trouble.

    However I wonder about developper's testsuit and benchmarks in order to give some clues to others about how great KSE is.

  3. Re:bsd problems by Piquan · · Score: 4, Informative

    It would have been nice for you to mention that you're using a Mac, instead of obtusely implying it (8600, BBEdit Lite).

    The section of OSX that copying a file involves is not BSD-related, as I understand it. It's Mach. (People who know more about OSX than I do, feel free to pipe up.) The kernel of OSX is not very BSD-based, and most of what you're talking about (HDD access, scheduling) takes place in the kernel. (To be fair, the scheduler that FreeBSD uses was adapted from Mach.)

    The 8600 (which was discontinued over a half decade ago, by the way) is not even compatible with OSX. The minimum requirement for OSX is the Beige Power Mac G3. (See Apple's requirements page.) So, I'm guessing you put in a G3 daughterboard. (Find out about the 8600 and available daughterboards at lowendmac.com.) But OSX doesn't support processor upgrade cards. (First paragraph of the requirements page.) Maybe you didn't put in an upgrade card, and are using the mach_kernel for the 604 from the Darwin project like this guy did. Either way, you're still not using a supported system.

    So, you're using unsupported hardware, and a BSD-related OS in an operation that's not related to the BSD bits, and using this to say that BSD sucks. Hmmm.

    I'm surprised an 8600 w/ daughterboard (which one, by the way? The 233MHz with 512k of cache?) works at all with OSX. As for why it's slow for you, I can only hypothesize, since I'm not a Mac guy. (That's right, anybody can find this stuff out with a quick google search or two!) The G3 upgrade card is going to need an L2 cache enabler. Do you have one installed? Okay, how about this idea. I'm guessing that your old, discontinued, unsupported hardware uses a bus controller (or other critical chip) that is not being programmed optimally by OSX. Why? Because the programmer writing that code knew that the chip wasn't going to be supported!

    My advice is to stick to using 9.1 on your 8600. And don't generalize about BSD from your situation; it's an extreme.

  4. Re:Comparison by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Linux (2.5) implements a 1:1 kernel threads model. KSE is a much more complex N:M threading model. FreeBSD also has brand new 1:1 kernel threads (similar to what Linux and Solaris have). You can choose (per application!!!) which threading library you like to use :-)

  5. How to enable libmap by kaeru · · Score: 4, Informative

    To do this you need to recompile ld-elf.so.1 to support dynamic lib mapping:

    cd /usr/src/libexec/rtld-elf/

    make -DWITH_LIBMAP
    make install

    Then you need to have a libmap.conf in your /etc dir. Details of it can be accessed by reading the man pages libmap.conf(8).

    Here is a sample with mozilla firebird mapped to libkse:

    [/usr/X11R6/lib/firebird/lib/mozilla-1.4b/Mozill aF irebird-bin]
    libc_r.so.5 libkse.so.1
    libc_r.so libkse.so

    Just add more entries if you wish. You can test out whether an application is using libc_r or libkse by running ldd(8).

    Note the library mapping can be done as Scott mentions also for libthr also for 1:1 threading.