AMD PowerNow support as found on AMD K6 cpus, the k6-2/3+ models now works on OpenBSD while SMP is going ahead too.
OpenBSD: SMP development; AMD K6 PowerNow Support
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Eugenia Loli
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Umm…those links are backwards. You might want to fix that.
With every 2 years cpu power is doubled, SMP is not such an issue for small servers.
More important is stability and security.
Thats why I use OpenBSD
If other BSDs have SMP, why is it so hard to get it into OpenBSD? Is there a serious reason why it has to be rewritten or something?
Because the different BSDs are _different_ operating systems altogether. Yes, they share a common root, and they are _similiar_, but internally there are quite a lot of differences.
So you can’t just copy ‘n paste SMP code from one BSD to another and think everything is gonna be done just like that.
The FreeBSD 5.x SMP code got its beginning from the BSDi implimentation, and the FreeBSD developers soon learned how big of a nightmare it was trying to use this code. I’d be surprised if any of it even exists now — its probably all been rewritten.
So yes, it’s likely faster and easier to just start from scratch than trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.
Hope this answers the question.
>With every 2 years cpu power is doubled, SMP is not such an issue for small servers.
Until multi-core processors arrive in a few years… And what about hyperthreading? and fully preemptive kernel? They also depend on SMP code.
The K6 has been out since the Pentium II, and they’re just NOW getting around to implementing PowerNow!? What a bunch of procrastinators…
So what is PowerNow ? I know of 3dNow on these chips but never heard of powernow. Just like SSE or something?
I have a K6-2 or 3, cant remember, and I installed OpenBSD 3.4 on it and used it as a mailserver for quite a while, the article makes it seem like this cpu was completely unsupported until now