[ninjatux]

Originally Posted by Diceman

I read quite a bit of stuff about FreeBSD 6.2 being unstable in it's SMP form under vmware ESX, typically in the form of kernel panics and the like under load. I just installed a test VM on a Poweredge 6650 with quad 3.0ghz processors, built world, built an smp kernel, installed the smp kernel. I then rebooted and ran cleanworld, now I'm running build world again just to see how it performs and I'm quite shocked to see it working out rather well. It seems to be running much quicker this time around however the Virtual Infrastructure client shows that it is still only using about 3.2ghz out of the 6ghz that it is allotted.(probably because the compiler can only use one proccessor at a time and I don't think FreeBSD will thread something like this)

Has there been any new information on this that I missed? Although it is not using much of the second processor, it appears to be stable thus far. I would like to run an SMP kernel on a few VM's that I have even though they may not need it. I have the power to use so I would like them to perform as well as they can.

Thanks!

SMP systems do not work like that. Just because you have more than one effective processor doesn't meant that you get the inherent speed boost. A quad-core at 3.2 GHz only operates at 3.2 GHz, not 12.8 GHz. The additional cores help improve scalability and stability and allow you to do more things at once since there are more processors to use.

When you compile you can use the -j option to specify how many parallel threads you want during compilation? On my dual-core, I've used -j20, and it's worked out well.