I'll admit, I'm not a low level OS designer, but I recall the times when Linux was first adding SMP support, and a lot of the discussions on that.
But what truly is standing in the way of AmigaOS to using SMP? The OS level scheduler should be able to determine if an application is multi-threaded and should use the cpus concurrently, or if it's just a single core application and run it that way.
I recall even Quake (2?) had initial multi-core support that you could enable with a configuration change, but it wasn't really optimized and indeed ran slower.
A good example under Linux is where older versions of Asterisks are single threaded (not too sure if they changed that in newer releases) and will only ever utilize one core. But software like apache will certainly take advantage of a multicore system.
I always thought it'd be kind of cool to be able to right-click an icon and select "use all cores"
You could even do some mad multitasking if you had a dual-core Amiga and just had the OS use one CPU and all applications use the second.
But as I said, I don't know what the technical barriers of AmigaOS and SMP there are, and why it is impossible. I wouldn't even think that most applications would realize there were a second core to use, and it'd just work on the one.
Now if it's due to the memory protection bits, then I could see multi-core processors being an issue, but a dual-processor setup could work, with different memory blocks available.
slaapliedje
