I am considering installing red hat on a workstation with two quad core cpus. I have installed redhat4 on servers before, but I am not certain whether those servers had one or more cpus. So I am not aware if the installation is different when there are two parallel processors involved.

Is the installation different for a motherboard with 2 separate quad core cpus? And would the installation be SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) or asymmetric multiprocessing?

Thanks

You just need an SMP kernel. The current or near current kernels of almost all distributions are SMP. I don't know whether Red Hat 4 is old enough to have a non SMP kernel as a choice, but even if it is, I'm sure it also has the choice of an SMP kernel. (Note a kernel without "SMP" in its name is probably still SMP).

Hyperthreading, multi-core, and multi physical CPU all are nearly the same to the OS and all are SMP in all common x86 multi processing designs.

So if I go that route, I will just make sure it is an SMP kernel and then do a standard install (whatever the updated instructions say).

Thanks

Maybe I read too much into your mention of "redhat4".

Do you have reason to stick with an old distribution?

Your dual CPU by quad core system implies fairly current 64 bit hardware.

If you want a server and/or you want to stick with something very similar to Red Hat, you probably want the latest version of Centos (which was 5.3 when I checked pretty recently). The 64 bit download of Centos 5.3 is SMP and I'm pretty sure all the 32 bit kernels available with/for Centos 5.3 are also SMP.

Or maybe you want to go with an easy workstation distribution, such as the one I use: Mepis. The kernels available with/for Mepis (64 bit or 32 bit) are SMP.

In Centos or Mepis (or almost any current distribution) you install normally and it will automatically enable the dual CPU quad core multi processing. There is nothing extra you need to do in installing or starting Linux.

If you compile your own kernel, you still get the choice to turn off SMP support, but pre built kernels without SMP are pretty rare. (The SMP kernels run just fine on single core systems).

I just mentioned redhat 4 to indicate that I have experience with redhat, but it was awhile back. I would be happy to use redhat 5 or newer.

Also I appreciate the other versions of linux you are telling me about. This is a new build, and we would probably be reinstalling the op system many times, so it would be great to have a couple of options to try out.