On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 09:47 -0400, Christoph Lameter wrote: > On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, raz ben yehuda wrote: > > > How will the kernel is going to handle 32 processors machines ? These > > numbers are no longer a science-fiction. > > The kernel is already running on 4096 processor machines. Dont worry about > that. > > > What i am suggesting is merely a different approach of how to handle > > multiple core systems. instead of thinking in processes, threads and so > > on i am thinking in services. Why not take a processor and define this > > processor to do just firewalling ? encryption ? routing ? transmission ? > > video processing... and so on... > > I think that is a valuable avenue to explore. What we do so far is > treating each processor equally. Dedicating a processor has benefits in > terms of cache hotness and limits OS noise. > > Most of the large processor configurations already partition the system > using cpusets in order to limit the disturbance by OS processing. A set of > cpus is used for OS activities and system daemons are put into that set. > But what can be done is limited because the OS threads as well as > interrupt and timer processing etc cannot currently be moved. The ideas > that you are proposing are particularly usedful for applications that > require low latencies and cannot tolerate OS noise easily (Infiniband MPI > base jobs f.e.) My 0.2 cents: I have always been fascinated by the idea of controlling another cpu from the main CPU. Usually these cpus are custom, run proprietary software, and have no datasheet on their I/O interfaces. But, being able to turn an ordinary CPU into something like that seems to be very nice. For example, It might help with profiling. Think about a program that can run uninterrupted how much it wants. I might even be better, if the dedicated CPU would use a predefined reserved memory range (I wish there was a way to actually lock it to that range) On the other hand, I could see this as a jump platform for more proprietary code, something like that: we use linux in out server platform, but out "insert buzzword here" network stack pro+ can handle 100% more load that linux does, and it runs on a dedicated core.... In the other words, we might see 'firmwares' that take an entire cpu for their usage. > > > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rt-users" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
