On Mar 2, 2010, at 11:31 AM, Tim Arnold wrote:

Hi,
I'm intending to use multiprocessing on a freebsd machine (6.3
release, quad core, 8cpus, amd64). I see in the doc that on this
platform I can't use synchronize:

ImportError: This platform lacks a functioning sem_open
implementation, therefore, the required synchronization primitives
needed will not function, see issue 3770.

As far as I can tell, I have no need to synchronize the processes--I
have several processes run separately and I need to know when they're
all finished; there's no communication between them and each owns its
own log file for output.

Is anyone using multiprocessing on FreeBSD and run into any other
gotchas?

Hi Tim,
I don't use multiprocessing but I've written two low-level IPC packages, one for SysV IPC and the other for POSIX IPC.

I think that multiprocessing prefers POSIX IPC (which is where sem_open() comes from). I don't know what it uses if that's not available, but SysV IPC seems a likely alternative. I must emphasize, however, that that's a guess on my part.

FreeBSD didn't have POSIX IPC support until 7.0, and that was sort of broken until 7.2. As it happens, I was testing my POSIX IPC code against 7.2 last night and it works just fine.

SysV IPC works under FreeBSD 6 (and perhaps earlier versions; 6 is the oldest I've tested). ISTR that by default each message queue is limited to 2048 bytes in total size. 'sysctl kern.ipc' can probably tell you that and may even let you change it. Other than that I can't think of any SysV limitations that might bite you.

HTH
Philip



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