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authorSamuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org>2011-03-02 23:57:52 +0100
committerSamuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org>2011-03-02 23:57:52 +0100
commita8bb9b64b2130101c387e7130b935c2b693cc3d4 (patch)
tree361aaf61a6b8009b928ddd936a478ab40e58c5f7 /faq
parent97366e18660f7e6c69363a9e4d7508964f523681 (diff)
parente4582a8e1da86a3d6098aac2420a1459934a3c84 (diff)
Merge branch 'master' of flubber:~hurd-web/hurd-web
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+[[!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]].