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SMP On OpenBSD, Coming Soon
Lord of the OpenBSD writes "At long last, SMP development on OpenBSD looks to be gearing up. One person is now doing full-time funded development on SMP. Project leader Theo de Raadt is now asking for funding for a second developer. Theo has announced that SMP support for i386 is planned for the OpenBSD 3.6 or 3.7 release, the first of which is due in 8 months."
SMP is one of those technologies encumbered by various patents. As it is now, SCO claim to own most of the support for it, and it's one of the features embroiled in the SCO vs IBM case.
How they'll get around this, I don't know. It's good to see the coding and experience getting out there and used all the more however.
-Truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
While I'm a big fan of OpenBSD and Theo both - I have to admit that Theo doesn't play nice even with those NOT beneath him - the loss of Niels Provos is still a bitter, bitter blow for the project.
This is not just "porting" like a device driver.
SMP touches every aspect of the kernel (scheduling, VM, VFS, etc.). Each OS is different internally and so you can't just rip code out of one and put it into another. It's not simply copying over a sub-directory and changing a couple of kernel system calls.
You have to pour over a lot of the files and make all the data structures are written to and read from correctly.
There's also more than one way to do SMP so how do you know whether he's "reinventing the wheel", or coming up with a novel approach?
OpenBSD's top priority is security. For SMP that means two things:
1. All potential security-relevant race conditions must be handled. A single processor system can never do two things at exactly the same time. A dual processor one can. OpenBSD wouldn't be OpenBSD if that would be allowed to affect the system's integrity.
2. Given the choice of an small project, that increases security, and a big one that probably will lower it, Theo will choose the one that increases security. Dual-processors are not a major concern to OpenBSD's core users, so support can wait until other things get done.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
As you may know, OpenBSD focuses on security. SMP support brings new concerns on this field.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
I am really sorry but have you even used OpenBSD recently? I installed OpenBSD 3.4 last month on a small server at home and installing third-party software was as simple as:
For a package:For a port:And... that's it!
Could you please explain to me how this is difficult?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Well SMP stands for "symmetric multi processing". That basically means the kernel can run on any processor--they're symmetric in that respect. (The advantage of being symmetric is that multiple processors can run kernel code at once, but the disadvantage is that you need locks and the like.)
If he were going to use the extra processors for nothing but crypto, (a) he'd be wasting them since crypto doesn't take that much CPU by today's standards and (b) it wouldn't be called SMP.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
However, I'd have to disagree with FreeBSD being the technological leader of the bunch. It's an excellent system, and is the most widely used/commercially supported of the three (or six, with ekko, DFly, and Darwin). However, I see NetBSD being much more advanced for a few reasons:
- It's more clean. ``It isn't done unless it's done right.'' As a result, it's much easier to extend (new drivers, new archetectures,
...)
- It is the first free unix-ish system to have many new features, like USB, IPV6, and crossbuilding support (ROCK is the only other one I can think of that has this) just to name a few.
- As a result of #1, it can serve as an excellent resource (a reference platform or nice collection of example code to stare at when you're bored).
- It's small, but generally highly scalable
...
I thought the very same way as most users at one time. I used to be a devout FreeBSD user. After buying a bit of HD space (bit=320GB), I decided to take on the multiboot challenge. I installed a total of thirteen different unixes (no windoze), telling myself to create the *exact* same environment on each. I decided to give NetBSD an OK-sized 10GB partition. The next day I swapped the 60G I gave to Slackware with it. It was faster and seemed, generally, a whole lot cooler. Within a week, I had a nice, stable NetBSD-current system up and running and found myself not being able to reboot to finish installing Solaris, OpenBSD, and Gentoo!The point is this: NetBSD is the `forgotten' unix in many ways, and I, for one, find that sad. I think all the BSDs, along with Linux, will be around for some time. NetBSD, though, is simply the bliss that I, too, nearly overlooked.
Myth. Linux does (and has for many years) run on just as many platforms as NetBSD. Most of NetBSDs "platforms" are actually just variants on a single architecture. Thus while NetBSD counts atari and amiga as separate ports, Linux just treats them as part of a single Linux/m68k port. In fact, NetBSD runs on two architectures that aren't currently supported by Linux (ns32k and vax), whereas Linux run on five that aren't supported by NetBSD (mips64, ppc64, s390, sh4 and etrax). I'm not trying to put down the worthy efforts of the NetBSD community, but I just get a bit fed up with people claiming that it's more widely ported than Linux. It was true in the past, but hasn't been for some time.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown