Symmetric multiprocessing in Solaris 2.0

SunOS 5.0 is the operating system component of the Solaris 2.0 environment. SunOS 5.0 is a dynamically loaded, fully preemptable, real-time, symmetric multiprocessing kernel that supports multiple threads of control within a single application process. The kernel not only runs equally on all processors within a tightly coupled shared memory multiprocessor, but also it has sufficient locking so that kernel processing can efficiently utilize multiple processors. The authors describe the overall architecture of the SunOS 5.0 kernel and the locking strategy of several major kernal subsystems to illustrate the concurrency available.<>