utilising multicoreprocessor support in linux 2288

Tom Forsmo

Something funny here. You compile the kernel for either uniprocessor (one processor with one core), or symmetric multiprocessor (more than one processor with possibly more than one core). Unless kernels have changed lately, those are the only two option.

To use more than one processor, be it a single hyperthreaded processor, a single multi-cored processor, or multiple processors, it suffices to boot a SMP kernel.

My old machine has two Pentium III processors (not hyperthreaded, not multicore), and it runs CentOS 4 with a 2.6 kernel, called

kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.0.2.EL

by rpm. Inboot, the actual kernel used is called

vmlinuz-2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp

I would just run top. When it is multiprocessing, the top of that looks like this:

top - 06:54:16 up 16 days, 21:37, 1 user, load average: 2.78, 2.26, 2.09 Tasks: 85 total, 3 running, 82 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu0 : 1.0% us, 0.5% sy, 98.2% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.0% si Cpu1 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 99.7% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 514516k total, 4968 plus 160k used, 17556k free, 1768 plus 12k buffers Swap: 1052216k total, 192k used, 1052024k free, 210328k cached

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 06:45:01 up 14 days, 15:53, 3 users, load average: 4.12, 4.16, 4.07