Multi-core CPU support

Apologies if this has already been discussed, I did have a quick look but am a bit pushed for time this afternoon (rushed post before I go out to wrestle with a Wintel network in an office somewhere).

I’m guessing that everyone’s seen the announcement about the Raspberry Pi 2? The one with a quad-core ARM SoC and 1GB RAM?

What’s the chance of getting threading into RO to support those extra cores, now that our base Pi is going to be lightning quick?

Of course a fully pre-empting system would be nice, with the multitasking moved into the kernel rather than bolted on to the Window Manager. But I’m aware that’s a lot of work. Practically a re-write of the entire OS perhaps?

Disclaimer: I’m an application-level developer, and while I’ve tweaked kernel level stuff on NetBSD it’s not what I do for a living. Which is why I’m throwing this one open to people with more low-level experience.

Where’s Gerph when you need him? ;-)

See there:
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/8/topics/3079

It’s not SMP, but closer to clustering, and ‘doable’ in a ‘short’ delay (no need to rewrite the OS and no problem of compatibility with old applications).

And it’s very Tube/Hydra like :)

I hope a bounty will be proposed… I’m sure it will collect lot of money.

And there’s lots on supporting multi-core CPUs over here