[Ukfreebsd] [FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD Status Report January-March, 2010 (fwd)

Robert N. M. Watson rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Tue Apr 27 05:05:20 BST 2010


On 25 Apr 2010, at 19:18, Sevan / Venture37 wrote:

> You're right, it sucks to have a network stack that's not multithreaded on the other hand it's really nice that everything works (ignoring the SMP related issues) on the other hand freebsd supports all those cores & puts them to use, but the hardware support is not there, for me featureset is far more important than performance but I guess if you're dealing with 10 or 20Gbps speeds it's the other way around.
> Is it right to forefit technical correctness in pursuit of speed?


The critical and central feature of the sun4v architecture *is* performance through hardware threads. If you can't use that with your OS (be it FreeBSD or OpenBSD), you have several choices:

- Use very expensive hardware ineffectually.
- Fix OpenBSD to support fine-grained multiprocessing in kernel.
- Fix FreeBSD to be stable on sun4v.
- Use another OS with the hardware.
- Buy hardware your OS runs well on.

I don't see much point in using sun4v if you can't use the threads, since much cheaper 64-bit x86 hardware will likely be a lot cheaper and faster. :-)

Robert


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