Home About USENIX Events Membership Publications Students
BSDCon 2002 Paper    [BSDCon '02 Tech Program Index]

Pp. 27–36 of the Proceedings
next up previous
Next: Introduction

Locking in the Multithreaded FreeBSD Kernel

John H. Baldwin
The Weather Channel
jhb@FreeBSD.org, https://people.FreeBSD.org/~jhb

Abstract

About a year ago, the FreeBSD Project embarked on the ambitious task of multithreading its kernel. The primary goal of this project is to improve performance on multiprocessor (MP) systems by allowing concurrent access to the kernel while not drastically hurting performance on uniprocessor (UP) systems. As a result, the project has been dubbed the SMP next generation project, or SMPng for short.

Multithreading a BSD kernel is not just a one-time change; it changes the way that data integrity within the kernel is maintained. Thus, not only does the existing code need to be reworked, but new code must also use these different methods. The purpose of this paper is to aid kernel programmers in using these methods.

It is assumed that the audience is familiar with the data integrity methods used in the traditional BSD kernel. The paper will open with a brief overview of these traditional methods. Next, it will describe the synchronization primitives new to the multithreaded FreeBSD kernel including a set of guidelines concerning their use. Finally, the paper will describe the tools provided to assist developers in using these synchronization primitives properly.




next up previous
Next: Introduction

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the BSDCon '02 Conference on File and Storage Technologies, February 11-14, 2002, Cathedral Hill Hotel, San Francisco, California, USA.
Last changed: 28 Dec. 2001 ml
Technical Program
BSDCon 2002 Home
USENIX home