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."

Comments

Re:smp?

[TheHonestTruth]

Because it wasn't important to Theo. Seriously. He had no need for it, plus it introduces security issues (I guess, I can't speak from experience) with what code is getting executed in what processor, so it wasn't developed for a long time (security being OpenBSD's focus). It just started getting some work in the past year or so.

-Truth

it's not "porting"

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:smp?

[Daniel_Staal]

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.

Re:Yet another modern feature added to *BSD

[bccomm]

Mod parent up, he made some good points.

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:

1. 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, ...)
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. It's small, but generally highly scalable
5. ...

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.