SMP man page on PC-BSD

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SMP(4)			 BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual			SMP(4)

NAME
     SMP — description of the FreeBSD Symmetric Multi-Processor kernel

SYNOPSIS
     options SMP

DESCRIPTION
     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 ALSO
     mptable(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
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