Thanks to Hany, an assidious MacBidouille reader from Italy :)
According to tests that he conducted on his G4 Dual 867, Jaguar can be rewritten to manage N processors .
Here are the steps he toke :
First of all, he took the XNU sources from Apple's ADC site (XNU being lthe Kernel, the core of the system), then modify the file /xnu/osfmk/conf/MASTER.ppc (the source is here), and at the heading "pseudo-device cpus", he replaced the value 2 by 64. That's it ! He then compiled the whole thing and inverted the two kernel with kswap.sh and then rebooted his Mac. Obviously, the performances measured by XBench and Cinema 4D are the same. But by using "hostinfo" in the Terminal, here is what you can read :
[hany@MacG4Dual ~] > hostinfo
Mach kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.6:
Thu Jul 17 20:45:52 CEST 2003; hany:BUILD/obj/RELEASE_PPC
Kernel configured for up to 64 processors.
2 processors are physically available.
Processor type: ppc7450 (PowerPC 7450)
Processors active: 0 1
Primary memory available: 512.00 megabytes.
Default processor set: 62 tasks, 198 threads, 2 processors
Load average: 0.00, Mach factor: 1.99
If you would like to try this out, and find out up to what value this varaiable can go, here is some help for the Kernel recompilation.
One thing is sure however, as long as we don't have 64Bits CPUs, we cannot be sure of this manipulation. Indeed, HostInfo does nothing but seek what is in th variable. It doesn't mean that the whole system is ready for N processors (N>2).
By the way, is there anyone who can lend us 64 G$ processors for a week ? It is for a good cause ! ;))
Select all / none
Apple
CD Drives
G5
Hard Drive
Internet
iPad
iPhone
iPod
Laptop
MacBidouille
Mac Intel
Mac OS X
Network
Overclock
PC
Peripheral
Software
Sound
SSD
Video
