Re: pae MP on cherry-xenmp

[Hugo Silva <hugo%barafranca.com@localhost>]

On 08/24/11 07:48, Cherry G. Mathew wrote:
> Hi Hugo,

> i386/pae domU, which is slightly different from an i386 domU. You can
> run this on a 64bit xen hypervisor, and unless you're running really
> va hungry (> 3G) applications, an i386 userland would happily run on
> it.
> 

Any special configuration/iso images/kernel options/sysctl knobs to
enable this PAE stuff on NetBSD i386? Anything needs changing on the
dom0 [amd64] ?


>> Purely from a curiosity standpoint, what's the status on dom0 MP and
>> amd64? Any ETAs? Is the work done on i386 most of the work needed for
>> amd64 MP ?
>>
> 
> They're related, since there're shared codepaths - the key difference
> is in the pmap, which uses a slightly different model. Having this
> work reliably for MP is the only roadblock for amd64 at the moment.
> 
> There's also a lot of optimisation left - the mmu op queues need to be
> adjusted for MP (see discussion on source-changes-d@) and possibly
> other things.

Ok.. if you had to guess, would you say dom0 MP (i386, amd64, both?)
will be available for testing this year?


This is why having people run this helps - performance
> numbers, hidden bugs, etc.

This may be tricky without amd64 support, altough I understand the logic
of starting with i386; Most people are running amd64 dom0s with amd64
domUs these days, I think. Personally, I can't remember the last time I
used i386, dom0 or domU (except my 6-year-old linux i386 workstation)

As it happens I'll be setting up a domU to host an encrypted OpenSSL CA
@work, and if it crashes on occasion it won't be too critical; but on
the other hand there's not a whole lot of performance-critical stuff
going on there! Nevertheless, I think it's better to have it running and
occasionally stressing it with updates to pkgsrc and compilation
(there's a nice one, compile instead of using pkgin.. I'll also rebuild
/usr/src after getting MP, why not) than not having anything running at all.

I was going with 5.1/amd64 for that one but I guess i386+pae/current
will work just as well for what it's doing..

I'll see what else I can adjust @work to incorporate more i386 domUs..
nothing else springs to mind right now, but I'll have a chillout week to
consider such questions :)

Regards,

Hugo