On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 02:50:15PM -0600, Matthew Weigel wrote: > Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > > >I suppose if I had a 16-core quad-socket Opteron board and needed to make > >the box into one giant firewall with 10 Gbit NICs, I'd be disappointed > >that the kernel only ran on one of the cores. > > OpenBSD is only used for firewalls?
No, of course not. However, I can't off the top of my head figure an application where one is only concerned about how many CPUs the kernel uses because all the others would be idle. With multiple CPUs, sure the kernel will stay on one (because it is a single process with one and only one thread), but the user-space apps should migrate out to the other CPUs as the load increases (AFAIK). I've never, even on my 486, said "Oh my God my box is sitting doing context switching! Whay don't we have threads!". And I've never owned a multi-CPU box. Doug.
