Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Morth
·
· Score: 4, Informative
*BSD had (useful) IPv6 long before Linux thanks to kame. OpenBSD is also the last of them to get SMP support, even if it's pretty fresh in NetBSD too (a year or so).
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Shakrai
·
· Score: 4, Informative
haha nice try, 4.x DOES have smp.
I have mod points so I actually researched the AC to see if he was right or wrong. Rather then waste them on an AC though I figured I'd actually post a link to back up his claim: FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessor Kernel.
-- I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man. We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
mikael_j
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Nice troll, FreeBSD 4.x does have SMP although it's pretty inefficient. 5.x has much better SMP but it's currently labeled "new technology release" and they recommend 4.x for production servers. 5.x is quite stable though..
/Mikael
-- Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
jmartinp
·
· Score: 2, Informative
FreeBSD 4.x has SMP and if memory serves me, 3.x had SMP as well. It's true that the 5.x branch includes a reworked SMP, also known as SMPng, which includes more fine-grained locking, but saying that 4.x branch lacks SMP is misleading to say at least.
FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #7: Fri Mar 12 15:22:05 EST 2004 xxxxxxx@xxx.xxxxxxxx.xxx:/usr/src/sys/compile/DERW OODSMP Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz CPU: Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon/Celeron (497.44-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = "GenuineIntel" Id = 0x673 Stepping = 3 Features=0x383fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE, CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR, SSE> real memory = 1073733632 (1048568K bytes) avail memory = 1039605760 (1015240K bytes) Changing APIC ID for IO APIC #0 from 0 to 2 on chip Programming 24 pins in IOAPIC #0 IOAPIC #0 intpin 2 -> irq 0 FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor motherboard: 2 CPUs cpu0 (BSP): apic id: 0, version: 0x00040011, at 0xfee00000 cpu1 (AP): apic id: 1, version: 0x00040011, at 0xfee00000 io0 (APIC): apic id: 2, version: 0x00170011, at 0xfec00000
Re:Time to move openbsd.org to OpenBSD then ...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Informative
That's actually crap. They use the university of alberta's server as it has more bandwidth available to it than their own connection.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Octorian
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Also, I belive that NetBSD already has SMP support (not sure when it went in there, though). So does Darwin, of course.
Re:Time to move openbsd.org to OpenBSD then ...
by
zyche
·
· Score: 5, Informative
RTFFAQ. http://openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#wwwsolar is
"www.openbsd.org and the main OpenBSD ftp site are hosted at a SunSITE at the University of Alberta, Canada. These sites are hosted on a large Sun system, which has access to lots of storage space and Internet bandwidth. The presence of the SunSITE gives the OpenBSD group access to this bandwidth. This is why the main site runs here."
And even given this, ftp.openbsd.org is usually very slow around release time.
SMP defined
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
dekeji
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Now that a lot of SMP technology has matured and proven its worth
You've got to be kidding: "SMP technology" proved its worth decades ago.
OpenBSD philosophy is to do it and do it well make absolutely sure that it is secure.
By itself, a concern over security does not mean that you have long time-to-market for a product. It is possible to implement secure software systems rapidly, but you have to give up on other things (like, for example, an insistence on manual storage management and raw pointer manipulation).
The degree to which OpenBSD's tradeoffs are desired by the market becomes clear from how widely it is used--and I don't mean that cynically: OpenBSD fulfills a significant function for a small market, but most people choose something else. It's good that we have choices like OpenBSD, even if most people choose not to use it.
Yes, it's true that NT was there early. OS/2 SMP was due for release in 1993 (before Microsoft and IBM split ways and Microsoft turned it into Windows NT). But there is a bit of a difference in that Microsoft had quite a bit of hand-holding from Intel to develop an SMP solution.
For Linux, by contrast, SMP support was done the hard way through reverse-engeering, experimentation, and careful studying of available technical documents with the end result a stable, scalable SMP solution. To me, that is more impressive.
Re:Wave of the future
by
REBloomfield
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Does windows have SMP/NUMA support yet?
Yes.
Is it economically more feasable to build a multi- (not so great)processor machine rather than a powerful single CPU?
No.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Chreo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Perhaps you should do your research a bit more thoroughly next time. The link you are referring to is about FreeBSD SMPng (ng = next generation, implying a previous generation). SMPng is a core tech of FreeBSD 5.x but SMP has been a feature for 4.x a long time.
From the page you linked:
FreeBSD supports Symmetric MultiProcessor kernels in the following releases:
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
Get informed plix...
by
CptnHarlock
·
· Score: 5, Informative
OpenBSD is NOT premirely a webserever. It can and is used as one (I do it), but its main use is as a firewall. It even got voted as "best application for firewalling" by the MS crowd..:)
I've been aware of OpenBSDs lack of SMP since 2000 when I installed it on a double PentiumPro 180 Mhz. I Thought it was weird it didn't have SMP since Linux and FreeBSD had it but after some reading I accepted the desision.
I guess the OpenBSD guys went for SMP considering the double core desktop processors gaining more ground. Am I correct?
Cheers...
-- $HOME is where the.*shrc is -- silver_p
Re:Get informed plix...
by
jimi1283
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Ok, I have mod points and I have to comment on this. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the OpenBSD team does not do anything at the whim of the bitching masses. Did you not read the recent mailing list thread about the decision to stop updating Apache in the ports tree??? And what about when they removed ipf???
Theo may be a hard headed son of a bitch but he takes care of buisness and is not swayed by popular opinion. This is not a sudden development, there were articles a year ago about how the OpenBSD team was looking for a full time programmer to work on SMP.
This has been planned, and when OpenBSD executes a plan they execute it well.
Re:Not so fast...
by
cubidou
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Since OpenBSD SMP support is mostly NetBSD's plus code style changes, I'd say it only took 4 months to import what was started 3 or 4 years ago by Bill Studenmund for NetBSD.
Credit where it's due.
Re:Not so fast...
by
cubidou
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Since OpenBSD SMP support is mostly NetBSD's plus code style changes, I'd say it only took 4 months to import what was started 3 or 4 years ago by Bill Studenmund for NetBSD.
Oh, and I forgot, removal of all ACPI code, too.
That means OpenBSD won't work with MP computers that have a broken MPBIOS or simply require MPACPI (like most, if not all, HyperThreading processors do).
Re:Not so fast...
by
Nimrangul
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So, is there some mitigating factor here that would convince anyone who was paying attention to deploy a mission-critical system on SMP OpenBSD in 2004?
If you see it in the 3.6 release, consider it ready. If you don't then it wasn't ready yet.
-- I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Alioth
·
· Score: 4, Informative
OpenBSD's focus is vastly different from Linux's (I use both, and I use them where appropriate). OpenBSD's primary focus has been on security and correctness of the implementation. Compare OpenBSD's pf with Linux's iptables - pf is so much more powerful and useful than iptables the difference is like night and day. The OpenBSD pf has security features that cost large sums of money in the closed source world.
SMP simply is not a priority for OpenBSD. The kind of uses OpenBSD is put to hardly ever requires it, so it's not in the least surprising that they are only just implementing it now.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
curator_thew
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You are an idiot: IPv6 support is a mandatory requirement to have as IPv6 rollout comes ahead in the next few years. It's a testimony to the solid reliability of the BSD protocol suite that the main experimental development for IPv6 (notably via. KAME) was undertaken on BSD. So this forward thinking will pay off.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
LizardKing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Do any of the other BSDs lack SMP support in this day and age?
NetBSD has had SMP support for some time, and it is now working on a number of platforms (sparc, i386, etc). It's largely been the work of Bill Studenmund, and also formed the basis of OpenBSD's SMP support. This kind of sharing is quite common amongst the BSD's, especially Open and Net.
Chris
SMP didn't make it more secure, so not a priority
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
I find that most changes to openbsd answer the question "how can we make this more secure?" SMP is a scalability issue, so it did not receive the developer time needed to make it work over the many many platforms that OpenBSD is ported to.
Imagine if the OpenBSD people had spent time on SMP instead of OpenSSH. We all benefit from the focus on security even if we don't use OpenBSD.
Re:OpenBSD commands respect...
by
lysander
·
· Score: 2, Informative
They're source-only updates on purpose -- the only binaries that are available are through releases and (recently) snapshots.
Once you update your src tree, you can recompile the kernel and system binaries if you need to -- whatever the patch requires. As a bonus, since everything is backed by cvs, you could make local changes and merge in updates rather seamlessly.
The snapshot builds, I think, are taken from -current rather than -stable.
-- GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
Re:Wave of the future
by
TheRaven64
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Does windows have SMP/NUMA support yet?
Windows NT has always had SMP support (I think, I haven't used the 3.x series). The workstation version supports 1-2 CPUs, the server ones support more, although they are limited to 16 (I think. Maybe 32. Too lazy to check) due to a the size of the processor table (see Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems for more information)
Is it economically more feasable to build a multi- (not so great)processor machine rather than a powerful single CPU?
More or less. Top of the line CPUs usually carry a large premium, and the mid-range ones usually have a much better price/performance ratio. On the other hand SMP motherboards are usually more expensive. In the future it will become more sensible, since the cost of increasing the speed of a CPU by n% increases over time.
Re:SMP didn't make it more secure, so not a priori
by
Alan+Hicks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
SMP is a scalability issue
SMP is also a security issue, a negative one. Implimenting secure SMP is not an easy thing to do IIUC. Making sure that processes access memory in a secure way on a multi processor machine is difficult.
-- Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
BeOS had SMP back in 1995!!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
When the BeBox was announced way back in 1995, BeOS already had support for the dual PowerPC cpus in the machine!!!
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
dasunt
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IPv6 is irrelevent right now outside of lab environments and isolated networks (cell phone providers, etc.).
How about this then: OpenBSD had ipsec in its core long before linux ever did. The vanilla linux kernel didn't get ipsec until the 2.6 series, everything before that was either 3rd-party kernel patches and daemons.
Hell, windows had ipsec before vanilla linux did.:(
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
the+morgawr
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You can view the CVS repository and decide for yourself.
Right now I think most of the kernel is under big lock. SMP is currenly on target for a stable release in OpenBSD 3.6 (Nov 1, 2004). I suspect that by 3.7 (May 1, 2005) big lock will have been pushed down into at least the major subsystems.
It may happen even before then, the Calgary hack-a-thon is comming up and SMP is a major focus. Mostly they are working on bug fixes but I wouldn't be surprised to see a bunch of SMP improvments come out of that.
Also, if you read the tech@ list archives you'll notice that they are asking people to test the bsd.mp kernel and report errors. They are also looking to borrow computers that have certain types of hardware problems that are causing software issues (so that SMP will be supported in them).
-- The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes: ipv6 ports for freebsd
haha nice try, 4.x DOES have smp.
*BSD had (useful) IPv6 long before Linux thanks to kame. OpenBSD is also the last of them to get SMP support, even if it's pretty fresh in NetBSD too (a year or so).
haha nice try, 4.x DOES have smp.
I have mod points so I actually researched the AC to see if he was right or wrong. Rather then waste them on an AC though I figured I'd actually post a link to back up his claim: FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessor Kernel.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
FreeBSD 4.x has SMP and if memory serves me, 3.x had SMP as well. It's true that the 5.x branch includes a reworked SMP, also known as SMPng, which includes more fine-grained locking, but saying that 4.x branch lacks SMP is misleading to say at least.
That's actually crap. They use the university of alberta's server as it has more bandwidth available to it than their own connection.
Also, I belive that NetBSD already has SMP support (not sure when it went in there, though). So does Darwin, of course.
RTFFAQ.r is
http://openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#wwwsola
"www.openbsd.org and the main OpenBSD ftp site are hosted at a SunSITE at the University of Alberta, Canada. These sites are hosted on a large Sun system, which has access to lots of storage space and Internet bandwidth. The presence of the SunSITE gives the OpenBSD group access to this bandwidth. This is why the main site runs here."
And even given this, ftp.openbsd.org is usually very slow around release time.
Wikipedia article on Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP).
Now that a lot of SMP technology has matured and proven its worth
You've got to be kidding: "SMP technology" proved its worth decades ago.
OpenBSD philosophy is to do it and do it well make absolutely sure that it is secure.
By itself, a concern over security does not mean that you have long time-to-market for a product. It is possible to implement secure software systems rapidly, but you have to give up on other things (like, for example, an insistence on manual storage management and raw pointer manipulation).
The degree to which OpenBSD's tradeoffs are desired by the market becomes clear from how widely it is used--and I don't mean that cynically: OpenBSD fulfills a significant function for a small market, but most people choose something else. It's good that we have choices like OpenBSD, even if most people choose not to use it.
Yes, it's true that NT was there early. OS/2 SMP was due for release in 1993 (before Microsoft and IBM split ways and Microsoft turned it into Windows NT). But there is a bit of a difference in that Microsoft had quite a bit of hand-holding from Intel to develop an SMP solution.
For Linux, by contrast, SMP support was done the hard way through reverse-engeering, experimentation, and careful studying of available technical documents with the end result a stable, scalable SMP solution. To me, that is more impressive.
Yes.
Is it economically more feasable to build a multi- (not so great)processor machine rather than a powerful single CPU?
No.
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
I've been aware of OpenBSDs lack of SMP since 2000 when I installed it on a double PentiumPro 180 Mhz. I Thought it was weird it didn't have SMP since Linux and FreeBSD had it but after some reading I accepted the desision.
I guess the OpenBSD guys went for SMP considering the double core desktop processors gaining more ground. Am I correct?
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Since OpenBSD SMP support is mostly NetBSD's plus code style changes, I'd say it only took 4 months to import what was started 3 or 4 years ago by Bill Studenmund for NetBSD.
Credit where it's due.
Oh, and I forgot, removal of all ACPI code, too.
That means OpenBSD won't work with MP computers that have a broken MPBIOS or simply require MPACPI (like most, if not all, HyperThreading processors do).
So, is there some mitigating factor here that would convince anyone who was paying attention to deploy a mission-critical system on SMP OpenBSD in 2004? If you see it in the 3.6 release, consider it ready. If you don't then it wasn't ready yet.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
OpenBSD's focus is vastly different from Linux's (I use both, and I use them where appropriate). OpenBSD's primary focus has been on security and correctness of the implementation. Compare OpenBSD's pf with Linux's iptables - pf is so much more powerful and useful than iptables the difference is like night and day. The OpenBSD pf has security features that cost large sums of money in the closed source world.
SMP simply is not a priority for OpenBSD. The kind of uses OpenBSD is put to hardly ever requires it, so it's not in the least surprising that they are only just implementing it now.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You are an idiot: IPv6 support is a mandatory requirement to have as IPv6 rollout comes ahead in the next few years. It's a testimony to the solid reliability of the BSD protocol suite that the main experimental development for IPv6 (notably via. KAME) was undertaken on BSD. So this forward thinking will pay off.
Do any of the other BSDs lack SMP support in this day and age?
NetBSD has had SMP support for some time, and it is now working on a number of platforms (sparc, i386, etc). It's largely been the work of Bill Studenmund, and also formed the basis of OpenBSD's SMP support. This kind of sharing is quite common amongst the BSD's, especially Open and Net.
Chris
I find that most changes to openbsd answer the question "how can we make this more secure?"
SMP is a scalability issue, so it did not receive the developer time needed to make it work over the many many platforms that OpenBSD is ported to.
Imagine if the OpenBSD people had spent time on SMP instead of OpenSSH. We all benefit from the focus on security even if we don't use OpenBSD.
Once you update your src tree, you can recompile the kernel and system binaries if you need to -- whatever the patch requires. As a bonus, since everything is backed by cvs, you could make local changes and merge in updates rather seamlessly.
The snapshot builds, I think, are taken from -current rather than -stable.
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
Windows NT has always had SMP support (I think, I haven't used the 3.x series). The workstation version supports 1-2 CPUs, the server ones support more, although they are limited to 16 (I think. Maybe 32. Too lazy to check) due to a the size of the processor table (see Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems for more information) Is it economically more feasable to build a multi- (not so great)processor machine rather than a powerful single CPU?
More or less. Top of the line CPUs usually carry a large premium, and the mid-range ones usually have a much better price/performance ratio. On the other hand SMP motherboards are usually more expensive. In the future it will become more sensible, since the cost of increasing the speed of a CPU by n% increases over time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
SMP is also a security issue, a negative one. Implimenting secure SMP is not an easy thing to do IIUC. Making sure that processes access memory in a secure way on a multi processor machine is difficult.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
When the BeBox was announced way back in 1995, BeOS already had support for the dual PowerPC cpus in the machine!!!
IPv6 is irrelevent right now outside of lab environments and isolated networks (cell phone providers, etc.).
How about this then: OpenBSD had ipsec in its core long before linux ever did. The vanilla linux kernel didn't get ipsec until the 2.6 series, everything before that was either 3rd-party kernel patches and daemons.
Hell, windows had ipsec before vanilla linux did. :(
Right now I think most of the kernel is under big lock. SMP is currenly on target for a stable release in OpenBSD 3.6 (Nov 1, 2004). I suspect that by 3.7 (May 1, 2005) big lock will have been pushed down into at least the major subsystems.
It may happen even before then, the Calgary hack-a-thon is comming up and SMP is a major focus. Mostly they are working on bug fixes but I wouldn't be surprised to see a bunch of SMP improvments come out of that.
Also, if you read the tech@ list archives you'll notice that they are asking people to test the bsd.mp kernel and report errors. They are also looking to borrow computers that have certain types of hardware problems that are causing software issues (so that SMP will be supported in them).
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)