> I've heard rumours flying about that NetBSD 2.0 (somewhere down the road)
> will be a BigLock [TM] MP thing.
> 
> I was seriously hoping that BigLock would never see an official release.
> It just seems the wrong thing to do.  Yes, it's a stepping stone, ...

Some code may be too difficult or too little used to warrant the
effort of converting it to more fine grained locking.

Having a BigLock means that the MP effort is off the ground, and
allows a gradual move to more fine grained locking which should (touch
wood!) provide better performance.  The migration is underway already
-- I've seen Jason's commit message for the first system call that
doesn't need this lock, already. :-)

The presence or absence of a BigLock doesn't appear to me a
showstopper for a new release -- if nothing else, it has no effect if
compiled out on uniprocessor machines.

Regards,

Giles