SBus FDDI / SPARC *BSD SMP (was: Re: [geeks] A Real OS? (was: Re: m y capitalization.. etc.))

[James Sharp]

> On 20 May, James Sharp wrote:
> 
> > I've got the Network Peripherals CDDI card properly probing under 
> > NetBSD right now.  We'll see how much farther I can get with it.
> OK. 5% of the work is done. Good luck writing the SMT code. If you have
> somthing working I will be glad to test it on my NPI DAS card. 
> 
> BTW: How much throughput do you get from that NPI card and what SPARC
> does it live in? I got only 2.7MB/s when I did a quick test and the CPU
> (SS5, 110MHz, Solaris 2.6) usage was 100%. It seams that this card is
> quite suboptimal designed. (Compared to a DEC DEF[TEP]A) 

I've not tested it under any heavy loads.  Its living in a SS20/Dual SM81 (although with netbsd, it only uses 1 processor right now.)  And its definitely a suboptimal design if it relies on the software to do the SMT work. 

> 
> The point with NetBSD SMP on SPARCs seams to be mostly a lack of
> developers with time to do it. The NetBSD developers do everything
> as machine independent as possible, most prerequirements are solved 
> in a machine independent fashion. (AFAIK) So most of the SMP stuff 
> is in place. The upcoming 1.6 release will have SMP for VAX and Alpha. 
> -- 

the problem I see with it right now is that there are developers and people chomping at the bit to get everything SMP'd on the Sparc...but nobody wants to say "Hey, we need someone to fix "this problem" or "that problem"."