Re: Spinlocks, yet again: analysis and proposed patches

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
Cc: Gavin Sherry <swm@linuxworld.com.au>, Marko Kreen <marko@l-t.ee>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2005-09-14T02:54:59Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> I suspect distributors would go for the multi-cpu setup (especially if
> a uniprocessor build is *broken* for multiprocessor) and then in a
> lot of cases you end up not actually getting any benefit.  I'm afraid
> you'd also end up having to tell alot of people who complain to
> recompile, who will then complain back to their distributors, etc.

Yeah.  Being in charge of Red Hat's packaging of PG, I feel that pain as
keenly as anybody ... and I *know* RH will not be interested in shipping
two different packages.  If we go this way, the RH distributions will
use the --optimize-multi switch, because that's where the money is.

The bottom line here is that we will have to make some compromises:
if we want one-size-fits-all code, it will not be optimal for every
single architecture.  If we don't do one-size-fits-all, then we will
pay for it in various other ways.

			regards, tom lane