NetBSD-Current Gets SMP 41
MobyTurbo writes "NetBSD-current for the i386 architecture now has SMP. (It used to be that only FreeBSD had this feature among the free BSDs.) See the announcement
on the current-users mailing list."
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NetBSD-Current Gets SMP
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If all else fails, lower your standards.
Port to OpenBSD soon perhaps? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if this means OpenBSD will soon have SMP capability? Anyone have any thoughts? Inside information?
Re:bad news for Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess it depends on what sort of enterprise application you are talking about. I am building a commercial router/content filtering system for corporations using NetBSD and am *very* happy with it.
NetBSD is small, robust, and fast. Creating customized installation media is a breeze and the networking code is fast (okay, I haven't benchmarked it against any of the 2.4 Linux kernels, but it *seems* faster). Hell, my full ISO to install NetBSD and all of the other supporting software is approximately 100MB, and that's with quite a bit of extra stuff thrown in, like the development tools, etc...
The one place that NetBSD needs some help is with the installation process ("you mean I need to know the geometry of my drive???!" and "what do you mean sshd isn't started by default from rc.conf???") but even that is easily overcome by creating simplified installation floppies.
As a recent convert to NetBSD (from FreeBSD from Linux), I have to say that I am very pleased with the NetBSD product... adding support for SMP can only make it better.
Re:yawn (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, crazy guy.
I'll bite. I am currently running two SMP machines. Ok, one is for a DB server. Leave that one out of the question, it is actually underpowered for much of what it does, alas. I'm saving my pennies. The other however is my main desktop. It is not unecessarily powerful (2xPIII 600EB) compared to todays desktops systems, on the contrary, but I would never swap it for a single 1.2GHz (or even higher - a 2.8 P4 might get me thinking
The reason is simple. On my desktop I frequently have a number of concurrent processes running (Mozilla, compile, ogg player, a few ssh sessions and I might even fire up a game from time to time while I'm waiting for a compile to finish...). This kind of use shows what a boost "low-end" SMP can be - the system remains perfectly responsive way past loads that would have a similar "horse-power" single CPU system groaning - and that is very important for interactive desktop use. My box at the office is a single PIII 1 GHz, which should, on paper, hold its own quite well. It feels markedly more sluggish for desktop use.
SMP systems are little more prone to "pissing competition" type purchases than say, GeForces and P4. I don't know many people who can actually use all the horsepower of modern systems on the desktop, be it under *BSD or Linux. As someone once said, todays desktops just "wait faster". At the moment at least I'd take a lesser CPU 2-way SMP system over a more powerful single CPU for my desktop anyday.