Re: lilo vs other OS bootloaders was: FreeBSD makes progress

[David S. Miller]

   From: "Grover, Andrew" <[e-mail]>
   Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2001 14:52:17 -0700 
   
   I'm not advocating anything similar for Linux, I'm just saying it's an
   interesting thought experiment - what if the SMP-ness of a machine was
   abstracted from the kernel proper? How much of the kernel really cares, or
   really *should* care about SMP/UP?

Every spinlock :-) You'd have to either accept their overhead, or have
some way to nop out the instructions on uniprocessor boots.  There
would still be the space overhead after such code patching.

I remember the Digital UNIX folks did something interesting in this
area.  There should be a paper online somewhere.

Later,
David S. Miller
[e-mail]