Recently acquired a used itanium workstation (dell precision 730, 2 X 800 MHz) and was looking for a os to install. Never used linux before but downloaded Mandrake linux 8.1 for ia64. It installed incredably fast and booted up without a hitch. Look and feel is windows like. Chose the kde desktop (have no idea what it is anyway or the difference between kde and gnome). My question is how to determine whether the os is using SMP. The control center correctly identifies 2 CPUs but how can i be certain that they are being used (i.e., is there as equivalent to the windows performance monitor showing each CPUs utilization?)

Thanks
Ychap

i would assume if the control center picks up the second cpu then it's utilizing it.

also check dmesg output after a fresh reboot

There's a slightly messy way. Edit the file config-<your kernel version> with a text editor and look for a line that says "CONFIG_SMP=1". That means SMP is compiled into your kernel. To find our your kernel version type uname -r.

Thanks for both replies. Looked at dmesg through the console, which seems to act like a DOS window (I was raised on DOS and its command line and sometimes find GUIs difficult to work with) and several command lines indicate that the kernel is 'SMP'. It does recognize both microprocessors though. Being unfamiliar with the interface it took me some time to find a performance monitor for CPU utilization. Unfortunately, the KDE monitor seems to 'sum' both CPUs when it comes to % utilization. Once again, thanks all

command line tool 'top" should show the load on both processors, but apparently you can't rely on that 100%. When I had an SMP system top worked this way with no extra steps required. But I remember someone else had to recompile their top to work with two processors... As for GUI, if the system uses two processors, gkrellm will show them in two separate panels. Nifty.

Thanks Ferrix, absolutely right. The 'top' command indicates both the number of active processors and the degree to which each is being used. Dead on.

Thanks again