In message <200004230744.AAA03362@shell17.ba.best.com>, Todd Whitesel writes:
>I think you mean "accelerate" as in starting/stopping/changing-direction.

True enough.

>Projects like SMP are, quite frankly, one type of project that free software
>is REALLY BAD at. People like to laugh at Sun for being incompetent and
>taking 5 releases of Solaris to get their SMP figured out, but I have a lot
>of respect for them because they _bit_the_bullet_and_did_it_ while Linux
>and FreeBSD are still trying to feel good about their big-honking-lock SMP.

BSD/OS is still doing giant lock... but we know damn well we need to have real
kernel threads, and it looks like they'll be there in 4.2.  In our defense,
in the very first release, an SMP kernel could be told to go into SMP mode on
a single processor system without crashing.  :)

Anyway, there's a decent chance that the fine-grained SMP will be made
available to FreeBSD, in which case, NetBSD will doubtless get a shot at it.
:)

-s