[wlug] Re: FreeBSD 14.3 Released

On Thu, 12 Jun 2025 09:31:25 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:

'Syscons is not compatible with UEFI, lacks UTF-8 support, and is Giant-locked. '

The “giant lock” is the BSD equivalent of the old Linux “big kernel lock”. This was a leftover from uniprocessor days. It basically says “stop everything else while I do this”. Obviously that became a performance bottleneck in multiprocessor configurations. Linux got rid of the last traces of its lock about 15 years ago; it seems the BSDs still keep remnants of theirs.