NetBSD ARM SMP limited to 5?

[rons]

I have been having some fun lately with my Odroid XU4 running NetBSD 9.2. I even have a 'desktop' using X windows via the virtual framebuffer server Xvfb (since the ARM NetBSD build does not yet do native real framebuffers).

It works pretty well, but I notice on long compilations such as firefox, I can only ever see 5 cores running in 'top' view for the c compiler, even though the Odroid is an eight core board. Is the limit 5 cores for all architectures, or what?

[Onauk]

Originally Posted by rons

I have been having some fun lately with my Odroid XU4 running NetBSD 9.2. I even have a 'desktop' using X windows via the virtual framebuffer server Xvfb (since the ARM NetBSD build does not yet do native real framebuffers).

I remember using vfb on macos-ppc with 1GHz single core and it worked pretty well! Could run twm easily, fvwm was less enjoyable. Always nice to have this option when the drivers are not available.

Originally Posted by rons

It works pretty well, but I notice on long compilations such as firefox, I can only ever see 5 cores running in 'top' view for the c compiler, even though the Odroid is an eight core board. Is the limit 5 cores for all architectures, or what?

Do you use special flags to run on 8 cores? *I have not compiled a lot of C code but I*remember something like -jN to run on N cores.

[rons]

Do you use special flags to run on 8 cores? *I have not compiled a lot of C code but I*remember something like -jN to run on N cores.

Hi again,

Well, yes you use -j or in my case just set environment variable MAKE_JOBS=7 (leaving a core for my stuff LOL). As it turn out, eight cores wouldn't have been enough cores because it's the memory that I lack and need to compile firefox102. It takes 32GB of memory - YIKES!. So, that's gonna require cross-compile on intel or amd unfortunately. With five cores, was able to build Xorg and Gtk3 and Rust cargo pretty easily, but firefox 102 was a Odroid killer (only 4GB memory including swap!)

[rons]

I remember using vfb on macos-ppc with 1GHz single core and it worked pretty well! Could run twm easily, fvwm was less enjoyable. Always nice to have this option when the drivers are not available.

Xvfb works great, response is fast on local network. Still have to work out the security details for the X11 forwarding tho, as it is not secure by default. :-)