This is my not-so-technical understanding. OpenBSD's current SMP status: - The kernel uses a single lock for shared data. My understanding is that this means that the kernel itself doesn't benefit from SMP as much as it could otherwise, but it does use multiple cores. (I believe, but would like confirmation from someone who knows) - Userland processes can run on as many cores as are supported. So if you have multiple processes that are using a lot of CPU time, they will be split across all cores. - However all threads in a multi-threaded process will run on one core. For example Mysql will only use a single core, even though it is multi-threaded.
Bottom line, SMP is very well supported. People blow the BKL thing out of proportion. -- Jeremy Chase http://twitter.com/jeremychase On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 6:45 AM, Mihai Popescu B.S. <mihai...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hello, > > I got the idea from FAQ that OpenBSD is not using more than one core > from multicore processors. > Pretending I got it right, what's the benefit to buy an Intel Core 2 > Duo ? Just the bigger cache and some extra instructions? > > Is there a difference in how OpenBSD handles let's say a multicore > processor or an arhitecture with blade processors ? > > Thanks.
