RE:NetBSD hires Andrew Doran for full-time SMP development

How will this affect NetBSD 4?
What will this do for the current multicore cpu's and
NetBSD?

thanks
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Salut,

On Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:18:00 -0400, "Mark Thomas"
<thomas.s.markgmail.com> wrote:
> How will this affect NetBSD 4?
> What will this do for the current multicore cpu's and
NetBSD?

Either it will work perfectly well all of a sudden, or it
will break
beyond repair. :-P

aw
-- 
André Wienck <awiencksolnet.ch>

Hi Mark,

On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 02:18:00PM -0400, Mark Thomas
wrote:

> How will this affect NetBSD 4?

Simply put it won't, although I may backport one or two
minor items to
NetBSD 4.1 when 4.0 is out the door.

> What will this do for the current multicore cpu's and
NetBSD?

For some types of workload SMP on NetBSD 4 is great with 2
to 4 cores. If
you're doing compute intensive work like compiling or number
crunching
there's no problem. The problem lies with very I/O bound
workloads and a
larger number of cores/threads/CPUs: it's inefficient.
That's what I'll be
trying to address.

Andrew

On 7/27/07, Andrew Doran <adnetbsd.org> wrote:
> Hi Mark,
>
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 02:18:00PM -0400, Mark Thomas
wrote:
>
> > How will this affect NetBSD 4?
>
> Simply put it won't, although I may backport one or two
minor items to
> NetBSD 4.1 when 4.0 is out the door.
>
> > What will this do for the current multicore cpu's
and NetBSD?
>
> For some types of workload SMP on NetBSD 4 is great
with 2 to 4 cores. If
> you're doing compute intensive work like compiling or
number crunching
> there's no problem. The problem lies with very I/O
bound workloads and a
> larger number of cores/threads/CPUs: it's inefficient.
That's what I'll be
> trying to address.

Thanks for taking the time Andrew. I now know how to proceed
with my
business plan. As long as 4.0 will handle the current Intel
multicore
processors I can proceed with NetBSD.

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