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Nah. SMP support predates NetBSD 5.0 by a decade or so. May sound like nitpicking but .. roundabout 11, 12 years ago was when the default kernel config switched to SMP on all architectures where it made sense. Before users had to enable it themselves. alpha & sparc64 SMP, I'm pretty sure, is quite older e.g.

I'm wondering if it's a sarcastic comment in the style of the 'BSD is dead' meme.

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It was not a sarcastic comment. I checked the release notes and found nothing about it. It's true that i haven't checked the development of BSDs lately. I remember just that only Dragonfly had a working SMP kernel, with FreeBSD strugling and OpenBSD just ignoring this issue. But this was around 8 years ago.

OpenBSD does support SMP since 2004, FreeBSD even earlier.

You seem to confuse SMP with Intel's "HyperThreading", which is disabled on OpenBSD due to security concerns (SPECTRE et al.) and which makes sense to default to in an OS that takes security seriously.

SMP and HyperThreading are completely different things.

Since I haven't heard that anywhere else , I'd assume it's just FUD and not a meme (unlike "BSD is dying" https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying).

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