# NUMA Question



## Grendel (Dec 2, 2013)

Hi,

I'm not sure if this should go in this forum or some other forum. Mods, please move as needed.

I'm thinking of building a NUMA machine using AMD Opteron processors. It will be a workstation and not a server. My question is when I start up KDE and all the usual KDE processes get started will FreeBSD spread the processes across all the available processors, or will I see all the processes allocated to a single processor?

Thanks.


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## sossego (Dec 2, 2013)

If IBM keeps its promise to open the POWER processor, would you build a NUMA system on a POWER6/7/8 machine?


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## Crivens (Dec 2, 2013)

@Grendel, will you be using off-the-shelf mainboards? That would be some interesting project.


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## Grendel (Dec 2, 2013)

Crivens said:
			
		

> @Grendel, will you be using off-the-shelf mainboards? That would be some interesting project.


Please don't turn this thread into a hardware thread. I posted here mostly to get answers about how NUMA aware FreeBSD is these days. If you'd like to talk more about multiprocessor systems, and who doesn't, just head on over to 2cpu.com. You can find lots of information on them there. My current thread is here.

To answer your question, yes, I will be using off the shelf parts. I've been eyeing Tyan s2892 and s4881 boards lately. It's going to be a retro system, built around single core Opterons. I hope to use HE variants, but they're hard to find.


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## xibo (Dec 2, 2013)

My dual Xeon E5 system is currently running GUI consumers on both (physical) processors in FreeBSD-10 STABLE, though it was also doing so on 9.1 and 9.2. In "normal" KDE usage, KDE won't have enough runnable processes to make use of more logical processors than are present on one physical processor most of the time though.


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## Grendel (Dec 2, 2013)

xibo said:
			
		

> My dual Xeon E5 system is currently running GUI consumers on both (physical) processors in FreeBSD-10 STABLE, though it was also doing so on 9.1 and 9.2.


That's good to hear.



			
				xibo said:
			
		

> In "normal" KDE usage, KDE won't have enough runable processes to make use of more logical processors than are present on one physical processor most of the time though.


Even if we're talking about single or dual core processors?


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