SMP vs MP (Re: [TriLUG] Questions about Threading)

John Franklin franklin at elfie.org
Tue Mar 26 14:23:45 EST 2002


On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 11:43:02AM -0700, Ed Hill wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-03-26 at 10:50, Jeremy P wrote:
> > My understanding is that "symmetric" multi-processing, the S in SMP,
> > implies that each heavyweight (non-threaded) process is assigned to a
> 
> No.  "Symmetric" means the processors are "equal" in that they all have
> equal access to the system memory.  An example of non-SMP systems is
> NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) where the processors have private
> memory ranges and must query each other for memory addresses outside
> their local chunk.

The other (more common) major difference between SMP and MP is what code
is allowed to run on what processors.  MP systems may only allow
interrupts and kernel threads to run on the boot processor, while SMP
systems allow any code to run on any processor.

jf
-- 
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org
ICBM: N37 12'54", W80 27'14" Z+2100'



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