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

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.\" Copyright (c) 1997
.\" Steve Passe <fsmp@FreeBSD.ORG>. All rights reserved.
.\"
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.\" $FreeBSD$
.\"
.Dd December 5, 2002
.Dt SMP 4
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm SMP
.Nd description of the FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessor kernel
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Cd options SMP
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
kernel implements symmetric multiprocessor support.
.Sh COMPATIBILITY
Support for multi-processor systems is present for all Tier-1
architectures on
.Fx .
Currently, this includes alpha, i386, ia64, and sparc64.
Support is enabled using
.Cd options SMP .
On most platforms it is permissible to use the SMP
kernel configuration on non-SMP equipped motherboards.
The only exception to this rule is the i386 platform.
.Pp
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 options APIC_IO .
The
.Xr mptable 1
command may be used to view the status of multi-processor support.
.Pp
.Fx
supports hyperthreading on Intel CPU's on the i386 platform.
By default, logical CPUs are not used to execute user processes due to
performance penalties under common loads.
To allow the logical CPUs to execute user processes,
turn off the
.Va machdep.hlt_logical_cpus
sysctl by setting its value to zero.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr mptable 1 ,
.Xr condvar 9 ,
.Xr msleep 9 ,
.Xr mtx_pool 9 ,
.Xr mutex 9 ,
.Xr sema 9 ,
.Xr sx 9
.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 alpha, ia64, and sparc64 architectures.
.Sh AUTHORS
.An Steve Passe Aq fsmp@FreeBSD.org