HP-UX 11i Internals

Multiprocessing Data Structures

Each processor has a data structure that is used to keep track of data specific to that processor. This structure is of type struct mpinfo, which is typdefed to mpinfo_t. The global variable mpproc_info is declared as a pointer to a struct mpinfo. At boot time, the system allocates enough memory to hold one struct mpinfo for each processor. It then points mpproc_info to the beginning of this allocated memory. In this way, mpproc_info can be used as an array of struct mpinfo by using the processor index. For example, mpproc_info[0] is the mpinfo structure for the first processor in the system. The mpinfo structure is also sometimes called the per-processor data pointer (PPDP).

The mpinfo structure is a huge structure—over ...