Hyperthreading
I might buy a laptop in the near future with a P4 3GHz CPU with hyperthreading. If I enabled hyperthreading (I presume you have to do that in the BIOS) and installed linux on this laptop what sort of kernel should I install? The SMP kernel? Will a distro, such as Mandrake, automatically detect the hyperthreading, see my system as having 2 CPUs, and install the SMP kernel?
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Hyperthreading requires an SMP kernel. And as far as I can recall - this may just be my memory making up things ;) - if you have problems with the install with hyperthreading enabled, turn it off in the BIOS, install without hyperthreading and recompile the kernel after install with SMP support.
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Why would you want to turn it off to boot Linux? Recompiling the kernel (if it's even necessary, I haven't been lucky enough to test an installation with a hyperthreading CPU, therefore am unaware of Mandrake's ability to detect it) is a half hour job. For such a vital part of the system, it's really rather easy to compile. If you need a guide to it there's one at http://tldp.org.
In other words, no, I don't know of anything that would let you change BIOS settings on each reboot - other than changing them yourself. Any such solution would be a kludge anyway, it's best to try to get hyperthreading working with Linux first instead of searching for a workaround now :D |
I've never recompiled a kernel before in my life, I'm scared. :eek:
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Think of it like this - as long as you backup your old version, and don't overwrite it's entry in your bootloader, you're free to delete any botched up kernel you like.
It took me 3 attempts to get my first working kernel, but in the end, it's worth it. I just kept making newbie mistakes like choosing ext3 as a module instead being built in. Follow the guide at tldp and you should be fine. |
RH9 detects it
Yeah, I just purchased the P4P800 mainboard with the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz (hyperthreading). Redhat detected ... and installed the smp kernel from the start. And I've had no problems yet. So I would imagine that Mandrake...Debian...etc should do the same (or at least in the very near future).
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