Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 25th Jul 2007 13:57 UTC, submitted by Oliver
"The NetBSD Foundation announces that it has hired Andrew Doran to work full-time on improving symmetrical multi-processing in NetBSD. This work is made possible through a generous donation by Force10 Networks and internal funding by The NetBSD Foundation. Andrew Doran is an independent, Dublin based Unix systems consultant with special interest in building scalable systems. He has been a NetBSD developer since 1999 and is currently working on the transition from a big-lock SMP implementation to a fine-grained model, which allows multiple CPUs to execute code in kernel context simultaneously. Hiring Andrew full-time will boost work in this area, with the final result of a SMP implementation that is ready for tomorrow's multi-core-CPUs."
Permalink for comment 258227
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2005-12-31
Most BSDs come about with a general purpose: FreeBSD focuses on *performance*; OpenBSD is concerned with *security*; NetBSD is all about *portability*.
I don't think it useful for NetBSD to hire someone to try to fix the smp implementation. It'll be awhile to get the work completed.
The better solution would be to use FreeBSD source code as the base. Then modify & change it accordingly to meet their specific goal. For instance look at PC-BSD which uses FreeBSD code but customizes it to make a much more user friendly version of BSD. ( add features, make nicer menus & easier to use, etc ).
If NetBSD would adopt the FreeBSD code and work on making it more portable then that would certainly be pretty cool ( benefit from smp performance & fixes of FreeBSD ). Unfortunately this is very unlikely to happen since NetBSD already have their code base to work with ( don't think they'd be interested in using FreeBSDs ).
Edited 2007-07-26 02:09