Date: Sat, 22 Jun 1996 16:13:47 -0700 (PDT) From: "JULIAN Elischer" <julian@ref.tfs.com> To: jed@webstart.com (James E. [Jed] Donnelley) Cc: davidg@Root.COM, smp@freebsd.org, jed@llnl.gov Subject: Re: SMP version? Message-ID: <199606222313.QAA13836@ref.tfs.com> In-Reply-To: <199606220250.TAA18003@aimnet.com> from "James E. [Jed] Donnelley" at Jun 21, 96 07:50:57 pm
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> > At 05:38 PM 6/21/96 -0700, you wrote: > >>I am looking for a symmetric multiprocessing version > >>of Unix that I can get sources to. Do you know if there > >>is such a version of FreeBSD (or Linux? ;-) available? > >> > >>Sorry for the "out of the blue" message. My application > >>is a Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) shared memory > >>multiprocessor research project based on some unique > >>optical networking technology at Lawrence Livermore > >>National Laboratory. > > > > We (the FreeBSD project) are just starting our work on SMP support. We > >have a working single-kernel-lock implementation and if the sources aren't > >available for it now, they will be in a week or two. It's my understanding > >that similar progress has been made in Linux, but I'm not associated with > >that effort so I don't know its status. > > If you're interested, I can put you in touch with the people working on > >it...in fact, you can send email to smp@freebsd.org to contact the appropriate > >people. > > Good luck on your project. > > Do you (either of you) happen to know if there is a facility in > this system (FreeBSD for an SMP) for a single shared memory > "multiprocess." That is for multiprocessing on a single shared > memory image (with separate register sets)? Is there a defined > Posix interface to such memory sharing (beyond the mechanism that > I have seen in System V)? Any documentation that you could point > us at on this topic would be appreciated. yes and no.... there is rfork() which allows a process to share all it's exising address space with it's child. in the SMP version the two processess could be on separate processors of course.. there are changes coming up to allow the complete sharinf of address space including regions not yet allocated, but they are still germinating.. failing that, some changes were posted a few days ago that allowed shared memory operations between independently schedulable processes using "Threads" semantics. these were also 'preliminary' Ron Minnich and several others are doing some parallel computing work.. > > I am trying to estimate the cost of using FreeBSD to support such shared > memory multiprocessing on an Intel/SCI based shared memory multiprocessor. > We need to have the ability to run a single "job" using shared > memory on multiple processes to make the effort worthwhile. > > Assuming this sort of work would make sense, is there a community > that we could collaborate with and potentially contribute code to? I'm sure there is.. > > Thanks for any reply. > > --Jed http://www.webstart.com/cc/jed-signature.html > >
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