multi-core support for fiasco? v.s. multi-processor?

[Adam Lackorzynski]

Hi,

On Thu Jul 03, 2008 at 00:05:42 +0800, Zhang Yinfei wrote:
> I've listened to a lecture by Prof. Hermann Haertig about L4 in my
> university and I'm quite interested in doing some research on L4/Fiasco.
> I've reviewed some source code of Fiasco recently and one thing I can think
> of is to add multi-core support for L4/Fiasco. In my investigation, there
> are some people wrote papers about adding multi-processor (SMP) support for
> L4 but no one is talking about multi-core support. Is there a big difference
> between these two in the aspect of fiasco kernel? I'd be very appreciated if
> you guys can give me some opinions on this. Thanks.

There is basically no difference in the context we're talking about. SMP
generally denotes _symmetric_ multi-processing, i.e. processors are part
of the same memory coherency domain. Multi-core mostly denote multiple
CPUs in one package (e.g. recent dual-core, quad-core offerings). For
OSs it's mostly transparent if CPUs are sitting on the same socket in
the same package or on e.g. two separate sockets. Those difference are
getting bigger when the number of cores increase but that's not
commodity yet.



Adam
-- 
Adam                 adam at os.inf.tu-dresden.de
  Lackorzynski         http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~adam/