Re: FC4 on Dual Pentium III
From: Nico Kadel-Garcia (nkadel_at_comcast.net)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 08:13:20 -0500
"Enrique Perez-Terron" <firstname.lastname@example.org> wrote in message
> On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:47:41 +0100, Aaron Gray <email@example.com>
>> I am going to install Fedora Core 4 on a Dual Pentium III server.
>> Do I have to rebuild the kernel for it or does the install do Dual CPU
>> machines ?
> Go ahead and try; if it doesn't, by all means tell me.
> FC4 does have smp kernels in their installation media. It would be very
> surprising (to me, at least) if the install still installs a uniprocessor
> (I only have uniprocessors, so I have not tried)
> (smp = "symmetric multi-processor". "Symmetric" because all cpus can run
> kernel code.)
>From experience, it generally installs *BOTH*. The information about which
should be the default kernel is stored in /etfc/sysconfig/kernel, and is
used to set the default kernel when you do kernel updates. I'm personally a
big believer in ripping out kernels you don't use or plan to use, such as
ripping out the single-processor kernel when you have an SMP machine, just
to lighten the load on your disk and your RPM database and help avoid
confusion when booting.
Do note: if you're running a single CPU kernel, there is *no way* short of
installing a LinuxBIOS (which I don't recommend for amateurs) to detect that
you actually have another CPU or hyper-threading available, short of
rebooting with an SMP kernel and looking around in /proc/cpuinfo or using a
tool that looks in /proc/cpuinfo.. There may be some deep kernel probing
tools out there in user-land, but the only tools I've seen that might have
been useful some day were never complete enough to even be compilable in
It's a shame, really. There was some toolset from IBM I saw years ago, but
the consultant I met working on it got dropped as part of the dot-bomb
layoff years ago.