I have installed Redhat 9.0 and when I boot into linux, it lets me to choose between SMP and the normal one. I have just one P4 HT CPU, so does it means I shouldn't choose the SMP kernal?

Also I found that my Wireless USB adaptor driver which install under SMP kernal won't work in normal kernal. Do I need to install the driver again? Can I share driver between difference kernal??

Best Regards

Actually, to take advantage of the Hyper-Threading, you should use the SMP kernel. SMP stands for symetric multi processing and the way Hyper-Threading works with the os is to make it look like the computer has two processors. So, you should with the SMP kernel, and if for some wacky reason you didn't want to take advantage of you Hyper-Threading then you would have to re-install the driver for the standard kernel.

oh, that's help!! thanks

I have a dual processor Xeon system running Red Hat 7.3. It's really slow, and should be fast. SOmeone suggested to make sure I'm booting into the SMP Kernal. How do I do that?
Thanks.
Scott

#man uname

#uname -a

Read which kernel you are using.

Thanks.
Okay, and then if I'm not going to the SMP kernal, what's the fix?

Never mind that. I'm in SMP according to this info. But it's still buttass slow on 3D renders. Any suggestions on how to optimize?

Get an accelerated 3D card or the correct 3D drivers. I have Dual Xeon HT and I get 230fps in Quake3... Witha 8x AGP Radeon 9800pro256mb.

I'm planning on a new graphics card this weekend, and sound. But is there anything else I can do to optimize my system/file handling, stuff like that? Also, is there a "trace" command to watch the file handling while the o/s loads an application? I have one in particular (Softimage xsi) that takes forever to load, and while it's a big, complicated program, 3+ minutes to load is excessive.
Any ideas/suggestions will be appreciated.
Scott

Look into a quick method...

#man hdparm

And a google will help on that one.
There are a few quick things you might be able to do with this.

hdparm: good point. I run my smp system off a scsi disk so I haven't needed to mess with it, and on my regular system there is only like ata66 so there's nothing I can do on that one... But I have had laptops where it's been insanely slow like that and hdparm helped out a lot to speed things up.

i did a search and found ltt - it's a Linux Trace Toolkit that will do analysis of processes being run over a particular period of time and then you can analyze the output with some added tools. It, of course, is free, so I'm going to look at that. The only issue is that it requires "patching" and recompiling the kernal. Now for a guy that's been away from computers for 18 years, and just now coming back, and only been working with Linux since Thursday, this seems a pretty extreme jump, especially considering I don't even know more than 20 commands. So.... I will proceed slowly and at my current rate of progress I will soon be back where I started.
Scott

Just a FYI and a pet peeve of mine.. its spelled kernel, not kernal..