Do I need irqbalance on a Pentium D?

bluethumb · 05-11-2007, 01:14 PM

We have a machine with a dual-core Pentium D processor. Based on what I have read, it would seem that irqbalance is useful in this situation. But when I start irqbalance, the daemon just exits quietly. We have other machines with Core Duo processors, and the irqbalance daemon runs on them.

bluethumb · 05-11-2007, 01:25 PM

Oops. More details. I find some instances of these messages in syslog:

Quote:

May 11 10:08:23 hostname irqbalance: irqbalance startup succeeded
May 11 10:11:41 hostname irqbalance: irqbalance shutdown failed

Curiously, they don't appear every time.

Also, only one instance of ksoftirqd is running:

Quote:

root 2 1 0 09:23 ? 00:00:00 [ksoftirqd/0]

There are two of them on the Core Duo machines:

Quote:

root 3 1 0 May08 ? 00:00:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
root 6 1 0 May08 ? 00:00:00 [ksoftirqd/1]

bluethumb · 05-17-2007, 12:23 PM

I figured this out. I need to use the SMP kernel instead of the regular one. I had heard that "recent" kernels could figure it out by themselves, but apparently 2.6.9 isn't recent enough.