Subject: Just for fun
To: None <tech-smp@netbsd.org>
From: Andrew Doran <ad@netbsd.org>
List: tech-smp
Date: 01/14/2007 19:32:08
Hi,

A few years back pk@ locked a few more kernel subsystems and tried running
the kernel unlocked to see what would happen. I repeated the test with a
kernel from the newlock2 branch and to my amazement it completes a kernel
build on a 4 way system.

build.sh isn't so good - once it hits 'make objdir' and there's a lot of
intensive file system activity going it will either panic, or lock up in
biowait -> vnlock, somewhere around 30 to 60 seconds in.

Still, I think it's pretty encouraging that things work as well as they do.
I put dmesg and some lockstat output from a couple of runs at the URL below.
Note that the timings for the sleep locks are wrong.

	http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/biglock/

Cheers,
Andrew