I've got Fedora Core 3 installed and working on a dual AMD Opteron machine. I'm running the "2.6.9-1.724_FC3smp" kernel, both CPUs are working, life is good. I've noticed that during the default install the non-smp kernels were also installed. Why were these installed? Do the smp kernels need the non-smp kernels installed? If not, is there any reason to keep a non-smp kernel installed? For example would it ever help troubleshooting to boot into a non-smp kernel or would a non-smp kernel be useful in a recovery scenario?

TIA,
Jim

I'm sure there's some moment somewhere where it would become userful but I've ran my poweredge SMP over the years on RH7-FC2 and never needed a none SMP kernel.

Mandriva 2005 and SuSe 10 does that also,
i assume its purely incase the CPU was incorrectly idetified leaving SMP kernel possibly unbootable. Also in the case of P4 Hyperthreading can be a performance hit non SMP kernel may or maynot disable it..


Recovery no, Fail Safe possibly.

A Dual Processor System Can run a nonSMP kernel but efficient task balancing over the CPUs will be absent and a probable perfomance hit will occur at high load.


I have had issues with SMP kernels causing the RTC to run exactly 2times as fast as it should.
so have to use the nonSMP sometimes when i rely on the CLock.


Documention says a SMP kernel will run on Single CPU system but very poor performance