[cod3fr3ak]

I have a DNS server sunning on a Sun Enterprise 2 with two processors.
According to the named man page starting named with the -n option, followed by the n number of CPUs, will make named create n number of threads.
Has anyone gotten this feature to work. I've tried it on two different systems, and three versions of OpenBSD 3.3, 3.4, and now 3.5?

[elmore]

From the OpenBSD man Pages:

named(8)



-n #cpus
Create #cpus worker threads to take advantage of
multiple CPUs. If not specified, named will try to
determine the number of CPUs present and create one
thread per CPU. If it is unable to determine the
number of CPUs, a single worker thread will be cre-
ated.


Since OpenBSD is not SMP aware thus named will not be aware of your second CPU. If you want the second CPU to work I'd suggest looking into the sparc64 port of FreeBSD. It's come a long way in recent months and actually runs quite well on a few of my sparc machines (Ultra enterprise 2, Ultra 60, and a 250R). Named seems to run quite flawlessly on my 250R with -n 2.

[cod3fr3ak]

Do'h! Actually I knew that. But I'm, so brain-fried right now I figured that named would be able to grab the extra proc anyway. of course since the kernel didn't know it was there neither would named. Thanks Elmore. Sometimes things are just a little too simple.
How's freeBSD from a security stnadpoint. I only recently got my managment god to go along with OBSD for our mail and UNIX services server, because of OBSD's really good security track record. None of our servers actually sit in the open, but every little thing helps when I make proposals to my project lead. It makes him feel his tail is covered in the event of something bad happening.

[elmore]

Hehe, no worries FreeBSD is also a really good choice, it's also noted for security actually several members here work at a security appliance company whose entire line is based off of FreeBSD.

[molotov]

OpenBSD SMP is activly in the works again and is aparently working, on some systems (i386, only right now I think). Strog posted on this a while ago, we can only hope that after i386 SMP is done, they'll work on sparc64.

You can check out the mailing list here:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-smp&r=1&w=2

[Strog]

There's also an AMD64 smp kernel in snapshots if you need some 64bit goodness.

Theo asked everyone who runs current to test the mp kernels. He said it doesn't matter if you are running a uniprocessor system, it needs to be tested on all systems. I haven't been following it closely but they were hoping to get it stable enough to go into the 3.6 release. Apparently just for i386 and amd64 right now.

[cod3fr3ak]

Wow! Sweet! I knew a little about the AMD64 SMP. Thats going to be so nice.
Anybody got an AMD64 chip here? I am saving up till next year to get one for my main desktop.