Hi all,

I am trying to install Slack 9 on a machine with dual processor.
I have been through the whole install starting with bare.i and selecting that kernel as default, but my installation only sees one processor.

How can I install support for multi-processor with Slack 9? Do I necessarily have to recompile the kernel or is there an option from the slack cd to install support for multi-processor.

Help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks.
Laurent

you should use a kernel with SMP support.

I am not sure if slack install has such a kernel, (definitely not bare.i) If it has, you should choose that kernel.

If not, you should recompile the kernel, enabling SMP support.

Slack 9 hasn't got such a kernel. There is a smp.i available to download, however, I don't know if it is based on the kernel version 2.4.20 as it was released with slack 8.2.
I don't mind compiling (in fact, it is going through now) but it is long and a pain, especially because I need to install about 10 servers with dual processor configuration.

On that respect, does anyone know how I can transfer a kernel from a computer to another (exactly same hardware). Do I just need to copy bzImage from a machine to another or is it more complicated?

Thanks for the tip.

Yes, you can simply copy the new kernel from one machine to another (since they all have identical hardware).

Of course, you should keep the old kernel on each machine (with a new name such as bzImage.old) and you should edit /etc/liloconf to allow the option of booting either the new or old kernel, at least until the new one checks out OK. And then you'll have to run /sbin/lilo before you reboot. But of course you already knew that, right?


Enjoy!

--- Cerbere

I did know about lilo indeed.

About transfering kernel though. Is is just "bzImage" that you need to tranfer or other files too? What about all the modules?

Anyway, I need to successfully build a kernel with SMP support first which I don't manage to do. I take my old .config file (the one generated by the slack cd installation) simply disable APM and able SMP in menuconfig, do all the usual recompiling. When I reboot my machine, it sees the 2 processors but then go into kernel panic (attempting to kill init) and that is it.
I can obviously reboot from the old kernel without SMP as I saved it.

Any idea on how to sort that out? I am missing something when I add the SMP support? Any help gratefully accepted as it drives me nuts!
L

Personally I've always installed with the bare.i kernel then built my own kernel from source as it helps squeeze that last bit of performace out of the box.

cheers

Jamie...

laurentbon: Are you sure you compile the kernel the correct way? Compiled modules? did modules_install? Please refer to the compiling guide at the top of the slack forum if you are not 100% sure that you are doing the compilation the correct way.

About transferring, we do same kind of installs over here (identical hardware etc) and what we do is: we get 1 machine installed and tweaked perfectly (compile kernel, install all additional programs, do all configuration etc) then we use HD Image programs to obtain the image of its hard disk and copy it to other machines. Some things to watch out though, are hostname and network configuration, which you need to manually change

Hope you get your dual processor machine to work, they are fun to play with

Thanks for your reply mrpdaemon about using the hard disk images. Which piece of software do you use to dump the image? And where do you drop it? Network? Another hard disc? Cd?

About compiling, I am using the method detailled in the top thread of this forum and always had with success. I am starting to think that I might have a bios error in the way the cpus are declared to the OS... Arrrggghhhh!

Actually I am not very involved in the "cloning" process, but I believe that they use Norton Ghost for it. They simply plug the new hd, and do a hd to hd copy , if I am not mistaken.

Have you gotten the kernel to work?

Not yet. I am building it on another machine as I strongly suspect that there is something wrong with the hardware on the first one. Tried without luck installing RH8.2 with SMP on it, which proves that it might be a hardware issue..