.\" Copyright (c) 1997 .\" Steve Passe . All rights reserved. .\" .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without .\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions .\" are met: .\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. .\" 2. The name of the developer may NOT be used to endorse or promote products .\" derived from this software without specific prior written permission. .\" .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND .\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE .\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE .\" FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL .\" DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS .\" OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) .\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT .\" LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY .\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF .\" SUCH DAMAGE. .\" .\" $FreeBSD: src/share/man/man4/smp.4,v 1.24.2.1.6.1 2010/12/21 17:09:25 kensmith Exp $ .\" .Dd May 7, 2008 .Dt SMP 4 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm SMP .Nd description of the FreeBSD Symmetric Multi-Processor kernel .Sh SYNOPSIS .Cd options SMP .Sh DESCRIPTION The .Nm kernel implements symmetric multi-processor support. .Sh COMPATIBILITY Support for multi-processor systems is present for all Tier-1 architectures on .Fx . Currently, this includes amd64, i386, ia64, and sparc64. Support is enabled using .Cd options SMP . It is permissible to use the SMP kernel configuration on non-SMP equipped motherboards. .Sh I386 NOTES For i386 systems, the .Nm kernel supports motherboards that follow the Intel MP specification, version 1.4. In addition to .Cd options SMP , i386 also requires .Cd device apic . The .Xr mptable 1 command may be used to view the status of multi-processor support. .Pp The number of CPUs detected by the system is available in the read-only sysctl variable .Va hw.ncpu . .Pp .Fx allows specific CPUs on a multi-processor system to be disabled. The sysctl variable .Va machdep.hlt_cpus is an integer bitmask denoting CPUs to halt, counting from 0. Setting a bit to 1 will result in the corresponding CPU being disabled. .Pp The .Xr 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 .Va kern.sched.topology_spec reflects the detected CPU hardware in a parsable XML format. The top level XML tag is , which encloses one or more 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 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 tag contains the and tags. The 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 tag is the comma-delimited list of CPU indexes (derived from the "mask" attribute). The 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 topology_spec output for a system consisting of two quad-core processors is: .Bd -literal 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 0, 1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6, 7 .Ed .Pp This information is used internally by the kernel to schedule related tasks on CPUs that are closely grouped together. .Pp .Fx 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 .Va machdep.hlt_logical_cpus sysctl to one. Note that this operation is different from the mechanism used by the .Xr cpuset 1 . .Sh SEE ALSO .Xr mptable 1 , .Xr sysctl 8 , .Xr condvar 9 , .Xr msleep 9 , .Xr mtx_pool 9 , .Xr mutex 9 , .Xr sema 9 , .Xr sx 9 , .Xr rwlock 9 , .Xr sched_4bsd 4 , .Xr sched_ule 4 , .Xr cpuset 1 .Sh HISTORY The .Nm kernel's early history is not (properly) recorded. It was developed 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. .Pp .Fx 5.0 introduced support for a host of new synchronization primitives, 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 .Bsx . .Pp .Fx 5.0 also introduced support for SMP on the ia64 and sparc64 architectures. .Sh AUTHORS .An Steve Passe Aq fsmp@FreeBSD.org