FreeBSD is now self-hosting on the UltraSPARC T1

[Bachilo Dmitry]

В сообщении от Понедельник 22 мая 2006 08:54 m m написал(a):
> On 5/21/06, Kip Macy <kip.macy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I can't find the original e-mail, but someone was suggesting I post a
> > dmesg to link to.
> >
> > http://www.fsmware.com/sun4v/dmesg_latest.txt
>
> ...
> FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 32 CPUs
> ...
> SMP: AP CPU #31 Launched!
> SMP: AP CPU #30 Launched!
> SMP: AP CPU #29 Launched!
> SMP: AP CPU #28 Launched!
> ...
>
> Some phylosophical questions - is this machine really an SMP?  Can we
> have an "SMP" when there's only one chip? (it's CMT/CMP, isn't it?)
> Can we perhaps stop calling any MP an "SMP" one of these days?  While
> on topic, the Opterons aren't SMP either, and neither are the
> ht-Xeons...  but we somehow keep lumping them into the "SMP" category.
>  Maybe we should fix this once and for all?  Won't it be weird to
> write page-allocation code for NUMA machines and put the code into an
> SMP directory? What about coloring algorithms on the T1000 to improve
> locality in it's funky cache hierarchy, are we going to put that under
> "SMP" category too?  Who was it that decided that all the world that
> has more than core is an SMP?
>
> (please pardon the format of this mail - but I really only have
> questions, no answers...)

Well, this is 8-core processor, so it is pretty an SMP system, made to have 
cheeper multiprocessing then what we call "real" multiprocessor system does. 
Sun says that it is much wiser to place more cores then to populate PUs and 
they themselves call Niagara-powered (UltraSPARC T1) systems a 32-processor 
systems. So why not call it SMP? We say SMP when we want to say that there 
are many processing devices (cores), noone say that there must be many CPUs 
on the mainboard. On the other hand, thread and HT is not a physical core, so 
here I should agree - it's not SMP, it's stupid HT or great multithreading 
T1.

Nevertheless I am shure that noone want to break the tradition or rewrite the 
system just to forget this term....
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С уважением, Бачило Дмитрий
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