Hallo,
I installed OpenSUSE in a dual-core machine. If I use the 'top' command to monitor the CPU usage, I don't see how the two cores work separately.
Is it possible to do it as it happens with the task manager in Windows?

Until this moment all I have discover is that using system monitor
That it shows the programs that use the dual core and cpu load
my distro suse 10.3

all the best

Hello morfeus80

If you are asking for a graphical display of the usage of your cpu cores, then if you are using KDE there is a program called KSysGuard that can be configured to do it.

There may be something similar in Gnome, but I usually install GKrellM which can also be so configured.

Both kde and Gnome have system monitoring programs that allow you to see some aspects of system operation, probably including the information that you want.

For the kde version (kdesysguard), the information can be quite comprehensive (which isn't necessarily the same as comprehensible), but you do have to spend a little time configuring it.

The gnome application (system monitor) is less comprehensive, but probably easier to get started with. I think all you want is the cpu history plot on the resources tab, but I could be mistaken about the extent of the information that you are asking for.

If you are using something simpler like XFCE, there will be some own tools, but I can't remember what level of information you will get. You probably could run the kde or gnome application, but because you drag a substantial part of the relevant infrastructure with them, they change significantly the problem that they are monitoring. (This is like the Heisenberg uncertainty priciple, if that helps at all!)

You have to get the machine really cooking on something hard, that really chews up those cpu cycles. Then you'll see one task at 100% of cpu usage, with other tasks taking up another 25% of cpu, or something like that. If you want to know if you are using the right software to take advantage of both your cores, open a terminal and type in "dmesg | less" and page down until you see something about "smp"

David

This kind of information (which CPU's core a process uses) can be visualized also in top, but you have to add an additional field in the task area, since usually it is not visualized by default.

To do this launch top, then press 'f' to access the 'Field Select' screen, then press 'j' to toggle the visualization of the 'last used CPU'. Press enter to return to the main page and you will see an additional column in the task area called 'P'. According to the man page it is
If you have two cores you will see numbers 0 and 1 in this column, if you have 8 cores you will see numbers from 0 to 7 and so on. Moreover take in mind that if you launch a multithreaded process (e.g. a process capable of running in parallel on two or more CPU/cores) the percentage of CPU usage is up to 200% or more.

For example I have a machine running a parallel fortran code on two Xeon Quad core and it's a pleasure to see the top command report 796% of CPU usage!

Thank you,I installed ksysguard and it's what I need!

If you had read the manpage for top, you'd have seen that merely hitting the "1" (numeric one) key would have shown the CPU breakout.

You never stop to learn! I missed the way to split cpu's usage in the summary section of top. Thanks, syg00.