SMP question

Michel Talon talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr
Sun Jan 27 07:57:55 PST 2008


Haidut wrote:


> Like I said in my first email, all I need is a rough estimate - 1
> month, 2 months, etc. Assume full-time, 40 hour week.

It may be relevant to have an idea of the time it took to get a
working SMP implementation (by working i mean, such that N
processors offer an advantage proportional to N with respect to 1
processor) for Linux and FreeBSD. It was certainly several years
for Linux (with a *lot* of developers, and several paid full time) 
and about 5 years for FreeBSD. So i hope your project is not
a short term one ...

PS. By the way, FreeBSD is still not completely fine-grained locked
(for example the tty system is not) and one better take N<=8 above
to get satisfactory results. Linux is better in that domain because 
it enjoys using proprietary techniques covered by patents, which have been 
donated by IBM, SGI, etc. and that no BSD system can use, at least without
circumventing the patents. To take another exemple it took many years
Solaris to be considered better than the good old slowlaris system.

-- 
Michel Talon





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