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Operating Systems Software BSD

Jeff Roberson Begins FreeBSD SMPng VFS Integration 54

Posted by Hemos from the building-it-into-the-operating-system dept.
A FreeBSD User writes "Jeff Roberson has announced that he has has begun integrating the Giant-lock free VFS code into the FreeBSD 6.x development tree. These changes will permit the UFS file system to run on multiple CPUs at a time on SMP systems (hyper-threaded, dual-core, or regular SMP), leading to substantially improved efficiency. It will also permit the VFS code to be fully preemptible on uni-processor systems, improving interrupt handling latency. With this change, almost all of the FreeBSD kernel is able to run fully threaded and in parallel on multiple CPUs with much less contention. He anticipates merging this work as an "opt-in" feature to the FreeBSD 5.x branch in the future. He indicates that the testing will be "opt-in", i.e., this change will not be fully enabled by default for the time being, and that it will take a while (a few hours) to complete the merge, so users of the 6-CURRENT branch may want to hold off updating for a few hours while he finishes the merge. The work was sponsored by Isilon Systems."
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Jeff Roberson Begins FreeBSD SMPng VFS Integration More

Jeff Roberson Begins FreeBSD SMPng VFS Integration

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  • I thought Linux went "giant lock free" somewhere around 2.4, but I'm not sure about the filesystems. Anyone know?

    • Actually, does it really matter?

      I doubt the lusers will switch to FreeBSD, ever. I'm happy with that, less is more.
    • Linux is NOT giant Free. I believe Linus has stated that he sees no reason to be.

    • Re:Nice idea. Linux? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There's still the giant lock (lock_kernel/unlock_kernel) but it keeps getting pushed farther down. At this point there aren't many performance critical parts that are still protected by it. Most of the huge-SMP work has moved on to other areas these days. There's still some activity though -- just in the last few weeks there were some changes to allow drivers to handle ioctl()'s without the giant lock.

      But yeah the core filesystem stuff has been outside the kernel lock for AGES. I'm actually pretty amaz

  • BSD SMP VFS (Score:4, Funny)

    by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @10:32AM (#11455693)
    OMG WTF BSD SMP VFS? LOL!
    • Kind of funny that my reply is the highest rated, and I didn't even have a clue what the story is talking about. (Nor did I read the entire thing.) Bravo, moderators.

  • It is interesting to see how and when various operating system concepts get implemented. Interrupt threads are a pretty common technique in realtime systems, and have been around since the early 90's or so; they were the first driver technique that I learned.

  • Why are they only incorporating this into the 6-current tree? I know that it says opt-in, but I think that a good number of hte changes in the 6-current should be in the 5.x too, like the wireless support and this.

    Anyone know why this is merged into the 6-current tree? Is it just for fear of new code in the -release, and a desire to backport tested fixes?
  • I am somewhat new to FreeBSD (I've only been using it for about a year) so I dont know what the early STABLEs are usually like, but 5.x really doesnt seem to have stabilized and I'm running out of patience. I really like BSD, because the system is just overall a lot cleaner than other Freenixen that I've used, but I really think it needs to boot on my laptop without setting:

    set hw.pci.enable_io_modes="0"

    Setting this really bothers me mostly because I don't know what it means.

    Of course, after that, insert
    • set hw.pci.enable_io_modes="0"
      You should try looking this up.

      5.3 is the first in the 5.x -STABLE branch. It's kind of like using the 1.0 version of software. It's the first branch considered to be stable but even then there could be gotcha's that no one has found. I'd wait until 5.4 before moving to it if this is a production machine or you are not willing to play with the system.

      -sirket

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