SMP
- description of the FreeBSD Symmetric Multi-Processor kernel
SYNOPSIS
options SMP
DESCRIPTION
The
kernel implements symmetric multi-processor support.
COMPATIBILITY
Support for multi-processor systems is present for all Tier-1
architectures on
Fx .
Currently, this includes amd64, i386, ia64, and sparc64.
Support is enabled using
options SMP
It is permissible to use the SMP kernel configuration on non-SMP equipped
motherboards.
I386 NOTES
For i386 systems, the
kernel supports motherboards that follow the Intel MP specification,
version 1.4.
In addition to
options SMP
i386 also requires
device apic
The
mptable(1)
command may be used to view the status of multi-processor support.
The number of CPUs detected by the system is available in
the read-only sysctl variable
hw.ncpu
Fx allows specific CPUs on a multi-processor system to be disabled.
The sysctl variable
machdep.hlt_cpus
is an integer bitmask denoting CPUs to halt, counting from 0.
Setting a bit to 1 will result in the corresponding CPU being
disabled.
Fx supports hyperthreading on Intel CPU's on the i386 platform.
Since using logical CPUs can cause performance penalties under certain loads,
the logical CPUs can be disabled by setting the
machdep.hlt_logical_cpus
sysctl to one.
The
kernel's early history is not (properly) recorded.
It was developed
in a separate CVS branch until April 26, 1997, at which point it was
merged into 3.0-current.
By this date 3.0-current had already been
merged with Lite2 kernel code.
Fx 5.0
introduced support for a host of new synchronization primitives, and
a move towards fine-grained kernel locking rather than reliance on
a Giant kernel lock.
The SMPng Project relied heavily on the support of BSDi, who provided
reference source code from the fine-grained SMP implementation found
in
Bs x .
Fx 5.0
also introduced support for SMP on the ia64 and sparc64 architectures.