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

[René Rebe]

Hi,

Adam Lackorzynski wrote:
> 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.
>   
A place for optimization (that the last time I looked was not yet 
implemented) is
awareness of NUMA - Non Uniform Memory Architecture, e.g. with core-local
memory in AMD HyperTransport setups.

-- 
  René Rebe - ExactCODE GmbH - Europe, Germany, Berlin
  http://exactcode.de | http://t2-project.org | http://rene.rebe.name