Re: [PATCH] Add the infrastructure for supporting an infinite number of CPUs

On 02/06/2011 14:23, Ivan Voras wrote:
> On 01/06/2011 20:21, Attilio Rao wrote:
>> Current maximum number of CPUs supported by the FreeBSD kernel is 32.
>> That number cames from indirectly by the fact that we have a cpumask_t
>> type, representing a mask of CPUs, which is an unsigned int right now.
>> I then made a patch that removes the cpumask_t type and uses cpuset_t
>> type for characterizing a generic mask of CPUs:
>> http://www.freebsd.org/~attilio/largeSMP/largeSMP-patchset-beta-0.diff
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm just wandering: what is the expected overhead of this, compared to
> using a simple atomic integer (32-bit on i386, 64-bit on amd64)? I
> assume that this will introduce more work, like locking, in
> performance-critical code like the scheduler, etc.?

The reason why I'm asking is this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd405503%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

It's not necessarily a good approach, but it does have the benefit of 
keeping the CPU mask operations atomic... (I don't know if the benefits 
of this are big enough).