

ARM multiprocessor support - fcambus
http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/working_arm_multiprocessor_support

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fidotron
While welcoming this, it's amazing this kind of thing is news. That so many
communities failed to acknowledge the inevitable rise of SMP systems still
amazes me. This blind spot basically killed OCaml, which has fantastic single
thread performance, and it remains a serious problem for things like Python.

The same thing is now happening with the rise of GPGPUs.

~~~
4ad
> That so many communities failed to acknowledge the inevitable rise of SMP
> systems still amazes me.

What? NetBSD most certainly didn't fail to acknowledge the inevitable rise of
SMP systems. These boards lacked SMP support because SMP support is a lot of
work, _every chip is different_ (unlike x64), very few people know how to work
on this, there are very few people working on the NetBSD kernel, and _most
chips don 't have open documentation_.

You make it sound like these people were like "SMP... shit, who needs this?".

------
na85
I would love to run a *BSD as my daily driver on my X220, but battery life is
important to me and everything I've read suggests that most BSDs don't perform
as well as Linux + TLP,

~~~
bch
I run Net on my t420, and I like it. I feel like I get ~3 hours (I don't keep
hard time) using it, and it'd be fair to say typical use is development, w/
web (ie: running X, vi, clang, and various text-processing tools, Firefox, and
disk/network intensive things like syncing code-repositories).

I've got a 9-cell battery.

I'm running -current. Now that -current is also offloading rendering to my
integrated i915 gfx, I'll be curious to see how screen-intensive work will
impact battery.

The joy I get from NetBSD has outweighed various temptations from other OSes.
I've dabbled w/ Ubuntu and others, but they're not compelling enough to
switch.

If you've got any questions, I'm happy to try to answer.

~~~
cowabunga
Your 9 cell is probably knackered. I get about 7 hours out of mine and its two
years old.

~~~
bch
What OS/power-management are you running ?

~~~
cowabunga
FreeBSD 10 r10 stable with some ACPI frigs and dpms set up (I didn't write
them down)

Windows 8.1 Pro with Lenovo power manager installed via windows update.

Dual boot.

~~~
bch
New battery en route --- I'll be able to tell first-hand what the differences
are in a week or so :)

~~~
cowabunga
Good for you :)

I would check the Lenovo recall page (google it) before paying for one. That's
where I got my new one from - they replaced it free of charge ;-)

------
diyorgasms
I am disappointed not to see any of the Beagle* boards on the list of
supported devices, as it is another ARMv7 device with completely open
hardware. Still, this is a pretty cool consolidation effort.

~~~
markatto
The beagle{bone,board} use single-core OMAP3 derivatives; they don't require
multiprocessor support and were already supported.

~~~
Alupis
Other boards will undoubtedly get support over time.

Every single board requires a different setup, often times dtb, special boot
loaders or u-boot, special kernels, etc. Give it time.

Wandboard will be exciting once they support that.

[http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/details](http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/details)

