AMD SMP Support ?

AMD SMP Support ?

[Marco Schwarz]

Hi all,

I will get some new servers next week and I have two
questions:

- Does the current kernel support Dual Athlon CPUs ?

- Is it possible to build one kernel for dual Athlon,
single Athlon, dual PIII and single PIII boxes ? 

I would wait until next week and try it out, but
unfortunately our management asked me about a
statement about this :) (They want to be able to swap
server hardware in case one of the servers breaks -
without any software configuration if possible).

Thanks in advance,

Marco Schwarz

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Re: AMD SMP Support ?

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, [iso-8859-1] Marco Schwarz wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I will get some new servers next week and I have two
> questions:
> 
> - Does the current kernel support Dual Athlon CPUs ?
> 
> - Is it possible to build one kernel for dual Athlon,
> single Athlon, dual PIII and single PIII boxes ? 
> 
> I would wait until next week and try it out, but
> unfortunately our management asked me about a
> statement about this :) (They want to be able to swap
> server hardware in case one of the servers breaks -
> without any software configuration if possible).
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Marco Schwarz

You can use a SMP kernel on a single CPU machine with no problems.
However, there have been some reported problems trying to use some
Athlon "features". 

I use this configuration on '486, 586, 686 and the early Athlons
It works okay although it certainly might not be "optimum".

#
# Processor type and features
#
# CONFIG_M386 is not set
CONFIG_M486=y
# CONFIG_M586 is not set
# CONFIG_M586TSC is not set
# CONFIG_M586MMX is not set
# CONFIG_M686 is not set
# CONFIG_MPENTIUMIII is not set
# CONFIG_MPENTIUM4 is not set
# CONFIG_MK6 is not set
# CONFIG_MK7 is not set
# CONFIG_MCRUSOE is not set
# CONFIG_MWINCHIPC6 is not set
# CONFIG_MWINCHIP2 is not set
# CONFIG_MWINCHIP3D is not set
CONFIG_X86_WP_WORKS_OK=y
CONFIG_X86_INVLPG=y
CONFIG_X86_CMPXCHG=y
CONFIG_X86_BSWAP=y
CONFIG_X86_POPAD_OK=y
CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_SHIFT=4
CONFIG_X86_USE_STRING_486=y
CONFIG_X86_ALIGNMENT_16=y
CONFIG_TOSHIBA=m
# CONFIG_MICROCODE is not set
# CONFIG_X86_MSR is not set
# CONFIG_X86_CPUID is not set
CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM=y
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G is not set
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set
# CONFIG_MATH_EMULATION is not set
# CONFIG_MTRR is not set
CONFIG_SMP=y
CONFIG_HAVE_DEC_LOCK=y


Compiling a kernel like this will allow you to switch boxes at
will.


Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.1 on an i686 machine (799.53 BogoMips).

    I was going to compile a list of innovations that could be
    attributed to Microsoft. Once I realized that Ctrl-Alt-Del
    was handled in the BIOS, I found that there aren't any.

Re: AMD SMP Support ?

[Alan Cox]

> - Does the current kernel support Dual Athlon CPUs ?

Yes.

> - Is it possible to build one kernel for dual Athlon,
> single Athlon, dual PIII and single PIII boxes ? 

Yes. Build an SMP PII kernel and all should be fine. It won't make use
of the athlon optimisations and you'll pay the SMP overhead on all boxes
but its an acceptable trade off for easy management in most cases