MOL future plans

[mol-general@lists.maconlinux.org]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 07:57:05PM -0400, Bill Fink wrote:
> OK.  Running a 2.4.18-ben0 SMP kernel with the latest rsync of MOL, I ran
> the "startmol --test" which ran successfully (output attached). 
Good.

> Could you elaborate a little more on what the SMP unsafe conditions might
> be and if there are any workarounds, like avoiding doing certain things in
> Linux while you're in MOL?

Most of it is related to the MMU. Currently MOL 
accesses and inserts PTEs in the TLB hash table without
any locking (since the lock is not easily accessible from the
MOL kernel module). Moreover, TLB flushes are probably
not broadcasted properly between the CPUs.

Thus, it not possible to run MOL safely on SMP at
the moment but fixing it shouldn't be too hard. I'll 
look into it in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

/Samuel