Caldera and SMP [LWN.net]

Caldera and SMP

Posted Jun 12, 2003 13:10 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065)
Parent article: An open letter to SCO

> It is well known that Linux SMP support was initially helped by the company
> then known as Caldera.

Really? I'm not disputing the claim, but that wasn't known to me.
I thought the initial SMP support was by David S. Miller on the SPARC
platform. I remember a post to the lkml about symmetric multi penguins
or something like that :)

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Caldera and SMP

Posted Jun 12, 2003 13:25 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Really.

I can't dig up the definitive message now, but digging through Google turns up messages like this one. Also, pull out your 2.4.x kernel source and have a look at arch/i386/kernel/smpboot.c:

/*
 *	x86 SMP booting functions
 *
 *	(c) 1995 Alan Cox, Building #3 <alan@redhat.com>
 *	(c) 1998, 1999, 2000 Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
 *
 *	Much of the core SMP work is based on previous work by Thomas Radke, to
 *	whom a great many thanks are extended.
 *
 *	Thanks to Intel for making available several different Pentium,
 *	Pentium Pro and Pentium-II/Xeon MP machines.
 *	Original development of Linux SMP code supported by Caldera.
 * [...]
 */

(The bold font is mine - it doesn't appear in the source :)

Caldera and SMP

Posted Jun 12, 2003 21:13 UTC (Thu) by StevenCole (guest, #3068) [Link]

This is probably referring to the ASUS P54PNIP4 motherboard with 32Mb of RAM which Caldera provided to Alan Cox. I got that link from ESR's excellent OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint.

Caldera and SMP

Posted Jun 13, 2003 14:05 UTC (Fri) by stock (subscriber, #5849) [Link]

> *
> * Thanks to Intel for making available several different Pentium,
> * Pentium Pro and Pentium-II/Xeon MP machines.
> * Original development of Linux SMP code supported by Caldera.
> * [...]
> */
>
>
>
> (The bold font is mine - it doesn't appear in the source :)

I just check here by downloading a fresh copy of linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2, and this
line :

* Original development of Linux SMP code supported by Caldera.

is definitely inside the ftp.kernel.org kernel tree. The file is called :

/usr/src/linux-2.4.20/arch/i386/kernel/smpboot.c

Robert