Re: Discrete-system multiprocessing

Larry McVoy (lmcvoy@dnai.com)
Tue, 26 May 1998 08:19:33 -0600

: - The MP-aware kernel can be configured to run on a proper subset of the
: - processors, allowing another OS (or another Linux kernel) to run on the
: - remainder. Communication between the two is by normal network protocols.
:
: Someone will have to arbitrate access to whatever is used to point
: interrupts to different processor groups. Your suggestion of running
: an MP-unaware OS is interesting, but I'd be much more interested
: (personally) in multiple copies of Linux with failover support. That
: would need a _lot_ of help from the bus controllers.

I proposed something quite similar to this back at Sun in 1992. The Sunfire
stuff may or may not be related. What I was suggesting is that you run two
systems in the same box, with coarse grained (at exec time, never at fork)
parallelism. I prototyped this up in SunOS 4.x (it never saw the light of
day, McNealy wouldn't let any new work in 4.x go out the door) and it worked
quite well. I scaled parallel make on such a box to 9 CPUs and actually
get 10x speedup (vs a serial make, it was about 7x speedup vs a parallel
make on one system) for kernel builds.

It's worth pursuing, in my opinion.

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