Subject: Re: rps perfomance WAS(Re: rps: question

From: Rick Jones <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:25:26 -0700

jamal wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-04-15 at 09:41 -0700, Rick Jones wrote:
> 
> 
>>IPS (~= RPS) was running on shared FSB HP9000's.  Now, that was also a BSD 
>>networking stack with netisrq's and the like.  TOPS (~= RFS) was also run on 
>>shared FSB HP9000s, as well as CC-NUMA HP9000s and Integrity systems.  TOPS was 
>>implemented in a Streams-based stack tracing its history to a common ancestor 
>>with Solaris (Mentat).
> 
> 
> Sounds interesting.
> Wikipedia information overload. Any arch description of the HP9000? 

I should have been more specific - HP 9000 Model 800's :) PA-RISC based business 
computers running HP-UX.  In the case of IPS, HP-UX 10.20 ca 1995 or so.

> Did your scheme use IPIs to message the other CPUs?

Netisrs were kernel processes one per CPU (back then a core, a processor and a 
CPU were one and the same :), and while we didn't call them IPI's, yes, it was a 
"soft interrupt" directed at the given processor to launch the netisr if it 
wasn't already running.

TOPS was similar, but was with Streams and that did/does have some kernel 
processes not everything would happen as a kernel process.

rick jones

HP 3000 Model 900's - by and large the same PA-RISC hardware but running MPE/XL 
(later called MPE/iX)
HP 9000 Model 700's - PA-RISC based workstations
HP 9000 Model 300's - Moto 68K-based workstations (replaced by the 700s)