Re: SMP/cc Cluster description

Alan Cox
2001-12-06T22:47:13Z

> > Most of my block drivers in Linux have one lock. The block queuing layer
> > has one lock which is often the same lock.
>
> Hooray! That's great and that's the way I'd like to keep it. Do you think
> you can do that on a 64 way SMP? Not much chance, right?

It wouldn't be a big problem to keep it that way on the well designed
hardware. The badly designed stuff (here Im thinking the NCR5380 I debugged
today since its fresh in my mind) I'd probably want 2 locks, one for queue
locking, one for request management.

> > Which is easier. Managing 64 routers or managing 1 router ?
> That's a red herring, there are not 64 routers in either picture, there
> are 64 ethernet interfaces in both pictures. So let me rephrase the
> question: given 64 ethernets, 64 CPUs, on one machine, what's easier,
> 1 multithreaded networking stack or 64 independent networking stacks?

I think you miss the point. If I have to program the system as 64
independant stacks from the app level I'm going to go slowly mad