On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 1:40 AM, Sterling Windmill <sterling at ampx dot net> wrote:
> Over the course of a few hours I successfully built a 1.3b16 m0n0wall image featuring an SMP
kernel and including the msk driver.
>
> I am sending this e-mail through my Shuttle K45 and have so far not experienced any issues in
restoring the configuration from my ALIX board.
>
> Would it be possible to include the msk driver in the next release?
>

I just added it. Probably was an oversight the last time Manuel
updated the kernel config (if not Manuel, sorry, back it out). I also
compared the drivers that are there with FreeBSD 6.3 GENERIC and that
was the only one missing.


> Also, while I realize that embedded systems are still primarily using single core processors, it
is difficult to find anything but at least dual core systems in off the shelf PCs.
>
> Enabling SMP on the generic PC images would seem to make sense to me. Is there a specific reason
why this hasn't already been done?
>

The only thing on a m0n0wall box that generates any considerable load
is packet processing, and historically that didn't scale across CPUs,
so it was largely pointless. In newer versions of FreeBSD that's no
longer the case, and there are some performance benefits in network
throughput with SMP. Not sure how much in 6.x that m0n0wall 1.3 will
be based on, that's more so in 7.x and 8.x.

I don't think it would hurt to have SMP by default though. From
experience with pfSense, there are some systems that won't work with a
SMP kernel that work fine with one without SMP, and vice versa as
well. That's the only potential gotcha that I can think of. That
doesn't seem to happen in 7.x like it did in 6.x.

Because I have no idea why it's not there, I won't add it, I'll leave
that one up to Manuel.