On Tuesday 25 November 2003 10:47 am, Michael K. Johnson wrote:
On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 09:07:42AM +0100, Klaasjan Brand wrote:
> Search the list archives; I believe SMP was dropped from RH9 or Fedora
> because it never was really popular for i586 (and didn't perform that
> well too). You can build an i586 SMP kernel yourself...
That's correct. We don't have any functional i586 SMP
hardware that
I'm aware of either.
If it's just for one machine, it's probably best for Lamar to
just
rebuild the kernel for his machine (sorry, Lamar!), but if there are
really a significant number of people who will not only use after
release, but *test before release* on i586 SMP, then it's at least
worth discussion of whether or not to re-enable it.
I was just curious as to the why. The fact that Red Hat has no SMP i586
hardware is enough for me. As to performance, it is better than the UP i586
kernel on this box. At 133MHz, every little bit helps.
As far as building kernels, that's the easy part. Edit the configs, edit the
spec file, issue a rpmbuild --target=i586 -ba kernel-2.4.spec and go away for
awhile during the build. Then install the fresh kernel RPM's (which has a
special release tag, of course), which automatically updates things. Well,
at least it's supposed to, but this box doesn't do grub, it does lilo (GRUB
locks the box during boot, but LILO boots right up -- but that's probably due
to /boot being on a RAID). I have found that this is the most reliable,
least trouble way for me at least to build a custom kernel. But, then again,
I have maintained various RPM's for over four years, so this cycle is a
familiar one.
(Part of the
downside being forcing everyone to download those bits when they
get the ISOs, and then we get to also argue about what other bits
are being traded off the ISOs...)
You ain't a kiddin'....
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu