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[[!tag faq/support]]

[[!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]].

[[Project idea|open_issues/smp]].