SMP(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual SMP(4)NAMESMP — description of the FreeBSD Symmetric Multi-Processor kernel
SYNOPSIS
options SMPDESCRIPTION
The SMP kernel implements symmetric multi-processor support.
COMPATIBILITY
Support for multi-processor systems is present for all Tier-1 architec‐
tures on FreeBSD. Currently, this includes amd64, i386, ia64, and
sparc64. Support is enabled using options SMP. It is permissible to use
the SMP kernel configuration on non-SMP equipped motherboards.
I386 NOTES
For i386 systems, the SMP kernel supports motherboards that follow the
Intel MP specification, version 1.4. In addition to options SMP, i386
also requires device apic. The mptable(1) command may be used to view
the status of multi-processor support.
The number of CPUs detected by the system is available in the read-only
sysctl variable hw.ncpu.
FreeBSD allows specific CPUs on a multi-processor system to be disabled.
The sysctl variable machdep.hlt_cpus is an integer bitmask denoting CPUs
to halt, counting from 0. Setting a bit to 1 will result in the corre‐
sponding CPU being disabled.
The sched_ule(4) scheduler implements CPU topology detection and adjusts
the scheduling algorithms to make better use of modern multi-core CPUs.
The sysctl variable kern.sched.topology_spec reflects the detected CPU
hardware in a parsable XML format. The top level XML tag is <groups>,
which encloses one or more <group> tags containing data about individual
CPU groups. A CPU group contains CPUs that are detected to be "close"
together, usually by being cores in a single multi-core processor.
Attributes available in a <group> tag are "level", corresponding to the
nesting level of the CPU group and "cache-level", corresponding to the
level of CPU caches shared by the CPUs in the group. The <group> tag
contains the <cpu> and <flags> tags. The <cpu> tag describes CPUs in the
group. Its attributes are "count", corresponding to the number of CPUs
in the group and "mask", corresponding to the integer binary mask in
which each bit position set to 1 signifies a CPU belonging to the group.
The contents (CDATA) of the <cpu> tag is the comma-delimited list of CPU
indexes (derived from the "mask" attribute). The <flags> tag contains
special tags (if any) describing the relation of the CPUs in the group.
The possible flags are currently "HTT" and "SMT", corresponding to the
various implementations of hardware multithreading. An example topol‐
ogy_spec output for a system consisting of two quad-core processors is:
<groups>
<group level="1" cache-level="0">
<cpu count="8" mask="0xff">0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7</cpu>
<flags></flags>
<children>
<group level="2" cache-level="0">
<cpu count="4" mask="0xf">0, 1, 2, 3</cpu>
<flags></flags>
</group>
<group level="2" cache-level="0">
<cpu count="4" mask="0xf0">4, 5, 6, 7</cpu>
<flags></flags>
</group>
</children>
</group>
</groups>
This information is used internally by the kernel to schedule related
tasks on CPUs that are closely grouped together.
FreeBSD supports hyperthreading on Intel CPU's on the i386 and AMD64
platforms. Since using logical CPUs can cause performance penalties
under certain loads, the logical CPUs can be disabled by setting the
machdep.hlt_logical_cpus sysctl to one. Note that this operation is dif‐
ferent from the mechanism used by the cpuset(1).
SEE ALSOmptable(1), sysctl(8), condvar(9), msleep(9), mtx_pool(9), mutex(9),
sema(9), sx(9), rwlock(9), sched_4bsd(4), sched_ule(4), cpuset(1)HISTORY
The SMP kernel's early history is not (properly) recorded. It was devel‐
oped in a separate CVS branch until April 26, 1997, at which point it was
merged into 3.0-current. By this date 3.0-current had already been
merged with Lite2 kernel code.
FreeBSD 5.0 introduced support for a host of new synchronization primi‐
tives, and a move towards fine-grained kernel locking rather than
reliance on a Giant kernel lock. The SMPng Project relied heavily on the
support of BSDi, who provided reference source code from the fine-grained
SMP implementation found in BSD/OS.
FreeBSD 5.0 also introduced support for SMP on the ia64 and sparc64
architectures.
AUTHORS
Steve Passe ⟨fsmp@FreeBSD.org⟩
BSD May 7, 2008 BSD