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[20071107]
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SMP update: vmlocking branch in need of testing
Andrew Doran has continued his work on NetBSD's SMP implementation
and towards fine-grained locking inside the kernel. The goals of
the branch are:
- Make the virtual memory (VM) system and trap handling (e.g. for
page faults) MP safe
- Make the file system framework MP safe
Now he has reached another milestone and is asking for testers:
``for many I/O operations, page faults and so on, the
global kernel_lock is no longer taken. The code isn't tuned yet although a
quick test I did a while ago on a 4 CPU system showed something like a 40%
reduction in _system_ time while building a kernel.
It's approaching stability and I'd like to invite anyone who is interested
to test.''
Please see
Andrew's mail
for known problems, and instructions on how to test.
People that are interested in the details, and that want to help
out Portmasters working on the machine dependent (MD) parts can
find more information
in
another mail.
[Tags: smp]
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