Fedora SMP and 12 core cpu's

[Gilboa Davara]

On Thu, 2010-09-30 at 10:26 -0700, JD wrote:

> Granularity applies to the locking scheme in the kernel.
> It is how the kernel must prevent different cors/cpus from
> clobberig the same kernel global data at the same time.
> 
> Some locking schemes are coarser than others. There is
> an optimal point where further granularity will decrease
> performance.
> 
> I was looking for papers/studies that may have been done
> to see at what degree of granularity the payoff was highest.

Most of the 2.6 kernel no longer uses the BKL (AKA Big kernel lock) and
uses fine grained locking instead, making some code paths better suited
when it comes to operating in heavily-SMP'ed environments (10's of
core). (E.g. IP vs IPX)

As you are talking about recent hardware (AMD Opteron 6xxx I presume)
with (only) 12 cores, I doubt that you'll hit any major performance
barrier.

As I said in a previous comment, some additional information on what you
want to do with the machine will be helpful.

-- 
Gilboa Davara
http://www.wirex-systems.com