On Tue, 9 Oct 2007, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 08:03:18PM +0200, Henning Brauer wrote:
>> * Florin Andrei <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-10-09 19:34]:
>> >> next, you don't want SMP for such tasks. take out the second CPU and give
>> >> it to somebody who can use it, and run the uniprocessor kernel.
>> > So, assuming the box is a pure firewall / static router (so just pf and
>> > static routes), even with multiple interfaces, all those tasks run in a
>> > single kernel thread?
>>
>> yup
>
>Why is this? Is there a security reason why the kernel is
>single-thread; is it OBSD resource limitations (no developer time, no
>hardware, etc); is it not enough interest yet?
I'm not an OpenBSD developer, but I'd bet that the reason is that BSD
was originally written single-threaded (both because that's much easier
than multi-threaded and because multi-cpy systems were rare back then)
and has not [yet] been changed because changing to a multi-threaded
kernel requires a lot of very finicky work (with innumerable
opportunities to introduce very subtle bugs).
Dave
--
Dave Anderson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
