Multiprocessing is now mainstream. Kids, moms, grannies use CORE 2 and dual core AMD's. It's home computing now, not server or high power workstation material. And quadcore is available NOW, and quite cheaply!
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Is it just me, or up to now very few people were going the multiprocessing route on ECS?
I'd love to hear from those of you who have experience from the OS/2 multiprocessing trenches. How about v2?
My experience with SMP is kind of bad. I have been using OS/2 since early 90's and I never experienced so many random hangs as I am experiencing now with eCS2.0 on SMP mode.
It seems there is some serious limitation on memory management when running on SMP on some systems when using more than 512MB of RAM. At least, this is the case of my system.
On the other hand, when everything is working, the performance gain is overwhelming. Every single program loads much faster than on UNI mode. FireFox and OpenOffice load times are much smaller and the same happens to WPS startup and desktop archiving. Also, VirtualPC runs much smoother on SMP than on UNI (speed-wise). I had not made extensive testing/benchmarking, but the difference is really impressive.
I hope Serenity solve the SMP issues I am experiencing, or I'll need to disable SMP support even if I use a dual-core computer.
Just to add my 2 cents, I believe Serenity made a bad choice when decided to take the "closed beta" path. I believe they were afraid many people would use the beta version and never buy the final version. Well, while this can be truth, it's not likely they will avoid people using eCS without paying; it's just a matter of looking on the internet and one will find it to download in eMule, torrent, etc. Those who want to keep with illegal versions will do it, no matter what Serenity does.
On the other side, closing the beta, the amount of testers of eCS is really small - at least those that can really report problems, since those obtained it in "alternative ways" do not feel free to do bug-reports... and of course they do not want to read an answer like "Buy it and we will see if we solve your problem".
I believe I'll buy eCS2.0 when it is out (I'm tired of my old OS/2 4.52 and the infinite patchs and upgrades), but I'll be really pissed off if I try to install in this dual core computer and it fail to work ... after I had spent hundreds of bucks in it. And the same goes to other "closed" software for eCS, like someone said, Panorama VESA.
As a rule of thumb, I believe the more beta-testers, the better.