xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/smp.4 (revision 4b2eaea43fec8e8792be611dea204071a10b655a)
1.\" Copyright (c) 1997
2.\"	Steve Passe <fsmp@FreeBSD.ORG>.  All rights reserved.
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24.\" $FreeBSD$
25.\"
26.Dd December 5, 2002
27.Dt SMP 4
28.Os
29.Sh NAME
30.Nm SMP
31.Nd description of the FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessor kernel
32.Sh SYNOPSIS
33.Cd options SMP
34.Cd options APIC_IO
35.Sh DESCRIPTION
36The
37.Nm
38kernel implements symmetric multiprocessor support.
39.Sh COMPATIBILITY
40Support for multi-processor systems is present for all supported
41architectures on
42.Fx .
43Currently, this includes alpha, i386, ia64, and sparc64.
44Support is enabled using
45.Cd options SMP .
46On some, but not all platforms, it is permissible to use the SMP
47kernel configuration on non-SMP equipped motherboards.
48.Pp
49For i386 systems, the
50.Nm
51kernel supports motherboards that follow the Intel MP specification,
52version 1.4.
53In addition to
54.Cd options SMP ,
55i386 also requires
56.Cd options APIC_IO .
57The
58.Xr mptable 1
59command may be used to view the status of multi-processor support.
60.Sh SEE ALSO
61.Xr mptable 1 ,
62.Xr condvar 9 ,
63.Xr msleep 9 ,
64.Xr mtx_pool 9 ,
65.Xr mutex 9 ,
66.Xr sema 9 ,
67.Xr sx 9
68.Sh HISTORY
69The
70.Nm
71kernel's early history is not (properly) recorded.  It was developed
72in a separate CVS branch until April 26, 1997, at which point it was
73merged into 3.0-current.  By this date 3.0-current had already been
74merged with Lite2 kernel code.
75.Pp
76.Fx 5.0
77introduced support for a host of new synchronization primitives, and
78a move towards fine-grained kernel locking rather than reliance on
79a Giant kernel lock.
80The SMPng Project relied heavily on the support of BSDi, who provided
81reference source code from the fine-grained SMP implementation found
82in
83.Bsx .
84.Sh AUTHORS
85.An Steve Passe Aq fsmp@FreeBSD.org
86