Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2720 from 2003/2/24
Quote:
MarK wrote:
well, but AmigaOS already had this... remember PowerUp cards? there was 68k as a main cpu, and PowerPC was used from the beginning as just some kind of coprocessor, to make some computations faster. with a small list of new exec.library functions (like LaunchOnOtherCpuAsync(function,args)) would be enough for simple SMP :)
but these are really just my ideas as I know, how cpu 68k and ppc works, then i don't see this as a big issue.
bye, MarK.
In SMP you usually have all applications as well as the OS itself distributed more or less evenly and executed across all the available cores/CPU resources according to some scheduling policy. The entire environment, including the data, living as one. Having 100% of the OS and 99% of the applications running in a box on one CPU core, practically unaware of anything outside the box, while some individual program gets to execute some code on some other core, is not SMP, that's more like having a co-processor. Compare it to like having the OS and all applications running on a single CPU, and then you execute certain code in the GPU of a graphics card. Sure, you may get a speed benefit for certain computing tasks, but it's not what people expect to get when you claim the OS is "SMP enabled".
MorphOS is Amiga
done right! 
MorphOS NG will be AROS
done right!
