Simple RH 9 Kernel ?

[Carrot44]

When Redhat upgrades my Kernel thru their auto update or I first install RH 9 does the Kernel compile for my CPU and system or is it generic? And if I want true P4 power I have to recompile?

Also how does one turn on hyperthreading or is it supported yet?

Ken

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Unless it has "p4" in the name then it's probably not compiled for p4. Someone might have prebuilt p4 kernel packages for redhat but I kinda doubt it. Don't really know about hyperthreading.

 

[drag]

From what I understand there realy isn't much point compiling a kernel specificly for pentium 4 over i686 or i586, I could be wrong, though.


The stock (smp) kernel supports hyper-threading(I think) since 2.4.18 (current mainstream kernel is 2.4.23), however the kernel for Redhat has been heavily patched and modified from the stock vanilla kernel sources. I think redhat has supported hyperthreading in one way or another since redhat 7.3 at least. And has some support for the advanced scedualling needed for a performance increase using hyper threading. I think they backported 2.6's hyperthreading support.

You have to have SMP support compiled in the kernel, too. So look for SMP in your kernel of choice, maybe. I am unfamilar with what offerings come from Redhat, though.

To check it out do a:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

If you compiled a custom kernel you'd lose this support, though.

Hyperthreading is only usefull under specific circumstances though. For maximum cpu performance on a single programming thread is hurt by it. Or something like that. Multitasking is helped usually. Not to sure, I've seen benkmarks were it helped and others were it hurt.

 

[Sunner]

RedHat installs an SMP kernel by default if you're using a HT CPU, don't be fooled by the SMP part though, assuming it's RH 8.0 or 9, it will "know" that it's one physical and one logical CPU, so you're not missing out on anything

And RedHat supplies i386, i686, and athlon kernels, so if you update, just get i686, you won't notice any difference between that and a hypothetical i786.