freebsd-nq/share/man/man4/smp.4

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.\"	Steve Passe <fsmp@FreeBSD.ORG>.  All rights reserved.
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.Dd May 7, 2008
.Dt SMP 4
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm SMP
.Nd description of the FreeBSD Symmetric Multi-Processor kernel
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Cd options SMP
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
kernel implements symmetric multi-processor support.
.Sh COMPATIBILITY
Support for multi-processor systems is present for all Tier-1
architectures on
.Fx .
Currently, this includes amd64, i386, ia64, and sparc64.
Support is enabled using
.Cd options SMP .
It is permissible to use the SMP kernel configuration on non-SMP equipped
motherboards.
.Sh I386 NOTES
For i386 systems, the
.Nm
kernel supports motherboards that follow the Intel MP specification,
version 1.4.
In addition to
.Cd options SMP ,
i386 also requires
.Cd device apic .
The
.Xr mptable 1
command may be used to view the status of multi-processor support.
.Pp
The number of CPUs detected by the system is available in
the read-only sysctl variable
.Va hw.ncpu .
.Pp
.Fx
allows specific CPUs on a multi-processor system to be disabled.
The sysctl variable
.Va machdep.hlt_cpus
is an integer bitmask denoting CPUs to halt, counting from 0.
Setting a bit to 1 will result in the corresponding CPU being
disabled.
.Pp
The
.Xr sched_ule 4
scheduler implements CPU topology detection and adjusts the scheduling
algorithms to make better use of modern multi-core CPUs.
The sysctl variable
.Va kern.sched.topology_spec
reflects the detected CPU hardware in a parsable XML format.
The top level XML tag is <groups>, which encloses one or more <group> tags
containing data about individual CPU groups.
A CPU group contains CPUs that are detected to be "close" together, usually
by being cores in a single multi-core processor.
Attributes available in a <group> tag are "level", corresponding to the
nesting level of the CPU group and "cache-level", corresponding to the
level of CPU caches shared by the CPUs in the group.
The <group> tag contains the <cpu> and <flags> tags.
The <cpu> tag describes CPUs in the group.
Its attributes are "count", corresponding to the number of CPUs in the
group and "mask", corresponding to the integer binary mask in which
each bit position set to 1 signifies a CPU belonging to the group.
The contents (CDATA) of the <cpu> tag is the comma-delimited list
of CPU indexes (derived from the "mask" attribute).
The <flags> tag contains special tags (if any) describing the relation
of the CPUs in the group.
The possible flags are currently "HTT" and "SMT", corresponding to
the various implementations of hardware multithreading.
An example topology_spec output for a system consisting of
two quad-core processors is:
.Bd -literal
<groups>
  <group level="1" cache-level="0">
    <cpu count="8" mask="0xff">0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7</cpu>
    <flags></flags>
    <children>
      <group level="2" cache-level="0">
        <cpu count="4" mask="0xf">0, 1, 2, 3</cpu>
        <flags></flags>
      </group>
      <group level="2" cache-level="0">
        <cpu count="4" mask="0xf0">4, 5, 6, 7</cpu>
        <flags></flags>
      </group>
    </children>
  </group>
</groups>
.Ed
.Pp
This information is used internally by the kernel to schedule related
tasks on CPUs that are closely grouped together.
.Pp
.Fx
supports hyperthreading on Intel CPU's on the i386 and AMD64 platforms.
Since using logical CPUs can cause performance penalties under certain loads,
the logical CPUs can be disabled by setting the
.Va machdep.hlt_logical_cpus
sysctl to one. 
Note that this operation is different from the mechanism used by the
.Xr cpuset 1 .
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr mptable 1 ,
.Xr sysctl 8 ,
.Xr condvar 9 ,
.Xr msleep 9 ,
.Xr mtx_pool 9 ,
.Xr mutex 9 ,
.Xr sema 9 ,
.Xr sx 9 ,
.Xr rwlock 9 ,
.Xr sched_4bsd 4 ,
.Xr sched_ule 4 ,
.Xr cpuset 1
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm
kernel's early history is not (properly) recorded.
It was developed
in a separate CVS branch until April 26, 1997, at which point it was
merged into 3.0-current.
By this date 3.0-current had already been
merged with Lite2 kernel code.
.Pp
.Fx 5.0
introduced support for a host of new synchronization primitives, and
a move towards fine-grained kernel locking rather than reliance on
a Giant kernel lock.
The SMPng Project relied heavily on the support of BSDi, who provided
reference source code from the fine-grained SMP implementation found
in
.Bsx .
.Pp
.Fx 5.0
also introduced support for SMP on the ia64 and sparc64 architectures.
.Sh AUTHORS
.An Steve Passe Aq fsmp@FreeBSD.org