I have two Linux machines that use FC3. Once being an Intel Pentium 4 w/ HT technology and I notice that my kernel says "smb" after it. My Athlon does not so I did a search and it seems that Linux sees the H.T. technology as a seperate processor in some sorts. I was wondering if this is a good or bad thing to have on my main Linux machine.

I just don't know if having the smb kernel is a good or bad thing and if I should just use my Athlon XP 3200+ as my main Linux machine.

The P4 is great for power as it is pumping out 3.4GHz and 2GB or DDR 3200 RAM.

Thanks for any clarification on this matter.

Here are my machine specs:

- Intel Pentium 4 3.0C Northwood 800MHz FSB Socket 478 Processor
- Two Gigabytes of Corsair XPS PC3200 DDR RAM (4x512MB)
- BFG nVidia 5900OC 128 DDR

You must mean SMP? Symmetric Multiprocessing - two or more CPU's. What this means is that the kernel with the "SMP" (if that is what it is) can run on a HT CPU and "give" you two virtual CPU's to use.

It can be good if you have something you want to run, and give it lots of processing power, like raytracing. I use my P4 with HT for raytracing, tracing the top of the image to the middle on one virtual CPU, while the other virtual CPU traces the images from the middle to the bottom.

It can be bad if you want to run XWindows - my XWindows (on Redhat 9, kernel 2.4.20-8) is unworkable under my SMP kernel - the Nvidia driver for my Winfast card won't load, and even the plain-vanilla VESA driver is unstable.

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I just don't know if having the smb kernel is a good or bad thing and if I should just use my Athlon XP 3200+ as my main Linux machine.
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Well, do you want to run a GUI? Usually in GRUB you can choose if you want the SMP kernel booted or the "normal" kernel. If you have such an option on the P4 based system, it doesn't matter which machine you make your main Linux machine. However, if you CANNOT choose if you want to run the SMP kernel or not on the P4 based machine, I'd recommend using the Athlon since you might (I could be wrong) havel less problems running Linux on it since it has a uniprocessor kernel which might work better with XWindows.

Quote:

The P4 is great for power as it is pumping out 3.4GHz and 2GB or DDR 3200 RAM. Thanks for any clarification on this matter. Here are my machine specs: - Intel Pentium 4 3.0C Northwood 800MHz FSB Socket 478 Processor - Two Gigabytes of Corsair XPS PC3200 DDR RAM (4x512MB) - BFG nVidia 5900OC 128 DDR

I would especially recommend to work on the Athlon (if you see you can't boot the P4 into a single-processor kernel) since you have a hot graphics card and the NVidia drivers that will drive it only run under single-processor kernels.

Regards,