Correct kernel for dual AMD Athlon MP system?

JMCraig · 07-23-2008, 06:21 PM

Hi Folks,

I've got this old AMD Athlon MP system I'm running Debian on. I finally figured out today that I'm only running with one CPU. The kernel that's apparently installed is:

linux-image-2.6.18-4-486

Now, although I clearly need an SMP kernel to use both CPUs, I'm not sure which one would be the right one for these AMD processors. If you know (or know where to find out), I'd be grateful to hear. My first guess is:

kernel-image-2.6-k7-smp

(Upon further searching on the web, this seems to be the right kernel. If you know anything useful, I'd still like to hear it.)

But, I'm not sure how to figure out if the k7 is the right version or not--info on the kernel versions seems to be kind of light on debian.org. And the box's /proc/cpuinfo file says:

processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) MP 2400+
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 2000.178
cache size : 256 KB
... (omitted the rest of it)

Nothing k7-ish mentioned....

Anything you can tell me or point me to most appreciated.

John

Dutch Master · 07-23-2008, 07:08 PM

Using an AMD specific kernel never made any difference on my systems (all AMD: Athlon XP 32 bit series through current X2 64 bit) performance wise. So if your system is running fine, don't change your kernel. And from 2.6.18 onwards (iirc) all Debian kernels come as "SMP aware" as standard so if you add that 2nd proc it wouldn't make sense either to change. However, you may want to upgrade to Lenny (you're on Etch now) as it's currently in the process of becoming stable (r-c versions are released right now, so I doubt it'll take very long)

My

Takla · 07-23-2008, 08:43 PM

In Etch the k7-smp kernel is the best one for you, it's for Athlon and Duron including multiprocessor. If you upgrade to Lenny use i686.

JMCraig · 07-23-2008, 11:10 PM

Thanks Folks.

Dutch Master, since I already had 2 CPUs, I didn't want the 2nd one to be idle because the OS wasn't recognizing or using it--which, it clearly was not (given the dmesg output).

dmesg | grep CPU

Has better news now (omitted a lot of lines for clarity):

Initializing CPU#0
...
CPU0: AMD Athlon(tm) MP 2400+ stepping 01
Initializing CPU#1
...
CPU1: AMD Athlon(tm) Processor stepping 01
checking TSC synchronization across 2 CPUs: passed.
Brought up 2 CPUs

Thanks for the confirmation, Takla.