2 Major issues

The success of the 5.X series hinges on the ability to deliver fine-grained threading and re-entrancy in the kernel (also known as SMPng) and kernel-supported POSIX threads in userland, while not sacrificing overall system stability or performance.

2.1 SMPng

The state of SMPng and kernel lockdown is the biggest concern for 5.X. To date, few major systems have come out from under the kernel-wide mutex known as “Giant”. The SMP status page at http://www.FreeBSD.org/smp provides a comprehensive breakdown of the overall SMPng status. Status specific to SMPng progress in device drivers can be found at at http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/busdma. In summary:

2.2 Interrupt latency and servicing

SMPng introduced the concept of dedicating kernel threads, known as ithreads, to servicing interrupts. With this, driver interrupt service routines are allowed to block for mutexes, memory allocations, etc. While this makes writing drivers easier, it introduces considerable latency into the system due to the complete process context switch must be performed in order to service the ithread. This is aggravated by the extensive coverage over the kernel by the Giant mutex, and often results in multiple sleeps and context switches in order to service an interrupt. Drivers that register their interrupt as INTR_MPSAFE are less likely to feel these aggravating effects, but the overhead of doing a context switch remains. Interrupt service routines that are registered as INTR_FAST are run directly from the interrupt context and do not suffer these problems at all. However, the INTR_FAST property forces the interrupt line to be exclusive; no sharing can occur on it. The proliferation of shared interrupts on PC systems makes this undesirable.

Several ideas have been proposed to help combat this problem:

2.3 Kernel-supported application threads

The FreeBSD 5.1 development cycle saw the KSE package jump into a highly usable state. THR, an alternate threading package based on some of the KSE kernel primitives but implementing purely 1:1 scheduling semantics also appeared and is in a similarly experimental but usable state. Users may interchange these two libraries along with the legacy libc_r library via relinking their apps or by using the new libmap feature of the runtime linker. This excellent progress must be driven to completion before the RELENG_5 branch point so that the libc_r package can be deprecated.

This, and other documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.

For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.

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