summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/faq/support/smp.mdwn
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'faq/support/smp.mdwn')
-rw-r--r--faq/support/smp.mdwn28
1 files changed, 28 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/faq/support/smp.mdwn b/faq/support/smp.mdwn
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..e95edcd2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/faq/support/smp.mdwn
@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2009, 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation
+License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[!meta title="Does GNU/Hurd support SMP/Multicore?"]]
+
+The Hurd servers themselves are multithreaded, so they should be able to take benefit of the parallelism brought by SMP/Multicore boxes. This has however never been tested yet because of the following.
+
+[[microkernel/Mach]] used to be running on SMP boxes like the [[!wikipedia
+Intel_iPSC/860]], so principally has the required infrastructure. It has
+however not yet been enhanced to support nowadays' SMP standards like ACPI,
+etc. Also, [[GNU Mach|microkernel/mach/gnumach]]'s Linux device driver glue
+code likely isn't SMP-safe. As this glue code layer is not used in the
+[[microkernel/mach/gnumach/ports/Xen]] port of GNU Mach, the plan is to try it
+in this enviroment first.
+
+[[!tag open_issue_gnumach open_issue_xen]]
+
+That is why for now GNU/Hurd will only use one logical processor (i.e. one core or one thread, depending on the socket type).
+
+Once this issue is solved, there are follow-up issues about
+[[open_issues/multiprocessing]] and [[open_issues/multithreading]].