On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 12:22:00PM -0800, Aaron J. Grier wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 02:08:50PM +0000, David Brownlee wrote:
> > The goal for newlock2 was to rework the NetBSD kernel to permit
> > multiple concurrent processors in the kernel for SMP, rather than the
> > previous biglock SMP implementation where (effectively) only one
> > processor could be in the kernel at any given time (though any number
> > of CPUs could be running userland code)
> [...]
> > I believe he [Andrew] covered the options in his proposal to core, and
> > they made the (right) choice on how to proceed.
> 
> any chance for these to be published?  the core list is still opaque to
> us plebeians.

The minutes of the core team meetings are distributed internally to the
project - there hasn't really been a need in the past to make them any
more public than that. Not that we're trying to be opaque, just that
no-one's asked.
 
> > The current situation does not preclude someone with the desire to
> > reimplement a M:N threading system, but with any luck they will be
> > doing it on a kernel which has real SMP, and a reference _completely
> > working_ 1:1 threading system for comparison.
> 
> thanks David, that's the information I was looking for.
> 
> does core have a secretary?  are the "minutes" of these discussions
> public?

See above.

As to M:N being fixable, we asked the developer in question if he
wanted to fix them, but we were told that time was an issue which
would not be rectified any time soon, and so we decided to proceed
with the 1:1 work in newlock2 which Andrew was proposing.

Finally, a huge thanks from me to Andrew for undertaking this work - a
huge task, a truly excellent effort, and the final product deserving of
many beers, which I'm sure he'll collect fairly soon.

Regards,
Alistair