Linux On Mac

[Bill Fink]

On Sun, 6 Apr 2003, I wrote:

> On Sun, 6 Apr 2003, Samuel Rydh wrote:
> 
> > SMP support is finished. Note that MOL still presents just a single CPU
> > to the client OS although adding support for multi-CPU virtualization
> > should not be too difficult.
> > 
> > A recent benh kernel is needed in order to run MOL on SMP machines
> > (the official 2.4 tree does not export a symbol MOL needs).
> 
> Thanks for your efforts on this.  However, I've run into a problem.
> I haven't actually tried using SMP yet.  I thought I'd first try out
> the latest MOL on my existing setup, and used rsync to fetch it
> (recent files in the top level directory dated Apr 6 09:11).  The
> problem is that the new code is a lot slower.  With the released 0.9.68
> version of MOL, my MacOS 9.0.4 booted in about one minute, whereas
> the most recent 0.9.69 rsync code takes almost 6 minutes to boot.
> I'm running a UP 2.4.20-ben8 kernel, and running MOL in an X window.
> My system is a dual 500 MHz G4 with 768 MB of memory (MOL is given
> 256 MB).

Just a quick update on all this.  After a bug fix by Samuel for the
performance issue, updating my kernel to 2.4.20-ben10, and rebuilding
my mol-kmods, I tried running MOL to boot MacOS 9.0.4 on an SMP kernel,
and it worked fine.  Actually this had worked previously, but hopefully
it's now completely safe to do so.

Thanks again Samuel for all your efforts on this!  I can now use
both my CPUs on my dual 500 MHz G4 system.

						-Bill