[Click] Questions (SMP & x86_64) about click from a newbie

[Anand Kanagala]

Hi Eddie, Clickers,

I'm new to Click and am exploring using it for some rudimentary packet
munging. I gravitated towards Click primarily due to the promise of
configurability and programmatic manipulation of the forwarding path.

I've read all/most of the papers on click and have been browsing
through the email archives.

I saw some problem reports about SMP and I have a few questions
regarding what should work and what is a work in progress.

- The 1.5 Release notes say x86_64 is supported. How widely used is
this? Does it buy you anything  performance-wise when running on the
same CPU without using the x86_64 extensions?

- SMP - Are there any caveats to using click SMP other than being
careful about using the StaticScheduler to bind specific forwarding
paths to cpus.

thanks!
-anand

ps:  Since I had a (Intel) machine that was  x86_64 capable  and
supported HT I tried build an SMP capable x86_64 version of click and
kernel and got bogged down in some errors in the click patch to the
kernel to support C++ modules.

Getting realistic and targeting a vanilla x86 single threaded click
got me a working configuration to play with.