Messages in this thread |  | | From | "Grover, Andrew" <> | Subject | RE: lilo vs other OS bootloaders was: FreeBSD makes progress | Date | Tue, 4 Sep 2001 14:52:17 -0700 |
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> > ANdreas Dilger wrote: > > > Win2K even abstracts all SMP/UP code into a module (the > HAL) and loads this > > > at boot, thus using the same kernel for both. > > > the only possibility of this shows how ugly is SMP in win2k... > > Not necessarily. More likely the difference between SMP and > UP is marketing-only and both have the overhead of SMP > locking, etc..
No, they don't do this by running an SMP kernel on UP, they do it by abstracting functions that care about SMP into another module.
Here's Linux:
Drivers (SMP agnostic) Kernel (SMP/UP specific)
Here's Windows:
Drivers (SMP agnostic) Kernel (SMP agnostic) HAL (SMP/UP specific, contains locking primitive funcs etc.)
So they use the same kernel and just switch out the HAL.
I'm not advocating anything similar for Linux, I'm just saying it's an interesting thought experiment - what if the SMP-ness of a machine was abstracted from the kernel proper? How much of the kernel really cares, or really *should* care about SMP/UP?
For one thing, it would get rid of the hundreds of "#ifdef CONFIG_SMP"s in the kernel. ;-)
Regards -- Andy - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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