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A decade ago I got Gigabyte-GA-7DPXDW server motherboard with dual CPU Socket A slots for CPUs.

It was meant to use server CPUs named Athlon MP but they were very expensive ... but you could get 'casual' Athlon XP (desktop) processors and easily modify to ‘be’ Athlon MP (server) ones with one single connect on the top. Two Athlon XP 2000+ along with 1 GB of ECC RAM made FreeBSD run beautifully on it :)

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Was this before FreeBSD 6? If I remember correctly smp wasn’t fully cooked in before that. Every smp system back then I used Linux cause yah know. Linux.

I am not sure I will remember that exactly ...

I started with FreeBSD with 5.4 while 5.0 was the first FreeBSD version with SMP support. I recall that I moved to 6.0 quite fast without touching the 5.5.

I have a screenshot from 2006/07 with FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE ... so I would suspect that it rather was 6.x series.

FreeBSD before 6 really wasn’t suitable for smp workloads even claiming to be. Right now as Netflix has shown their smp implementation is easily tweaked for application specific purposes. At least in my dealings there be dragons in Linux smp. When openbsd really moped out of something like HT and is super pokey about stuff I always get a whiff something’s amiss.

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