[Voyage-linux] ATOM Dual Core (SMP)

[Marcus Scholz]

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Am 09.02.2011 15:12, schrieb Edwin Whitelaw:
> First, congrats on the the release of 0.7!
> 
> We have historically used the WRAP then ALIX boards for our routers but
> now need more than 100mbs on the wired interfaces and are testing a
> dual-core ATOM board with dual Gige ethernet.  0.6.5 loaded and ran fine
> but did not support SMP so the dual cores weren't active.  We recompiled
> the Voyage 0.6.5 kernel with SMP support and it runs fine showing all
> "four" processors.  Not sure if this will be significant for our routing
> needs though we plan to do extensive NAT and other iptables rule
> handling so I suspect having all the CPU power I can get is a good thing.
> 
> Would it be reasonable to enable SMP either in general or for an ATOM
> version of the kernel?
Why not use smp, if it's available, even HT *can* give you advantages,
but iptables kernel support is not multithreaded AFAIK.
If you plan to push > 30mbit of vpn traffic strongswan / openswan /
openvpn, you still have not enough power under the hood (also single
threaded) and on atom core is way too slow for this.
The most obvious advantage of an ATOM system over alix / wrap is that
this cpu has hardware interrupts, so the cpu is not beeing bothered to
process interrupt requests in software (will block out an amd geode
starting with 32mbit/s floating on 2 interfaces each (2 interface
nat/routing scenario).
The atom (at least with GSE chipset and above)) is able to process full
duplex gbit traffic on up to four interfaces, which doesn't mean, it can
also handle the server process(es) to serve those bandwidths.
> 
> I will be recompiling the 2.6.32 Voyage kernel for SMP shortly and
> happily share it if anyone's interested.
> 

Commander1024
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