Now I don't feel at all bad about not being able to run bsd.mp on my clunky old dual-266 Dell PowerEdge 4200. Pah! Programmers nowadays, no idea of commitment! ;)
On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 22:36 -0600, Benjamin Collins wrote: > On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 08:51:31PM -0500, Nick Holland wrote: > > digressed a bit (I'm sure that surprises everyone here that I'd do > > that), > > Shocked! > > Anyway, to folks who are wondering about SMP, all you have to do is > notice how little traffic there is on smp@ and how (relatively) few > commits there are that deal with smp. > > Writing quality SMP code is a *monumentous* task. I work for a > contracts-based software shop, and if I had to bid that one, I'd bid > hundreds of man-hours, if not thousands. If the core team of OpenBSD > developers is 50 people, there might be 4-5 people who could > concentrate all their OpenBSD efforts on this (just picking those > numbers of of thin air) If it takes 5000 man-hours to get scalable, > robust SMP code written, then we're talking 25 weeks of full-time work > for each of those 5 people. > > I don't know about you guys, but I can't take 25 weeks off from work, > and my spare time each week adds up to about to *maybe* 20-25 hours, > and that's *everything*. If I were to say "ok, I'll contribute 1000 > hours", and I totally ignored my wife and kids, my parents, her > parents, all my friends, community activites, etc., I'd be doing > nothing but sleeping, working my paid job, and working OpenBSD for > 40-50 weeks. It would take a year to get what folks are asking for > --- and that's assuming 4 other people doing exactly the same thing. > > My estimates could be off, but I think the ballpark is good enough to > get the point across. Even if I'm off by 2x, that's still 6 months of > 5 people doing *nothing else* but OpenBSD. > > [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
