Looking for a good portable linux system

Bruce Dawson jbd at codemeta.com
Sun Dec 19 20:12:01 EST 2004


On Sun, 2004-12-19 at 19:36, Michael ODonnell wrote:
> SMP was mentioned as a requirement.  Does the hyperthreading
> offered by certain Intel CPUs meet that requirement, or will
> only two physically distinct CPU packages suffice?

Interesting question. I don't know enough about the various vendor's
hyperthreading models, or how the better Linux kernels interact with
them - or how to tune a hyperthreading kernel to avoid the problems that
an SMP kernel would avoid altogether.. 

Essentially, I want one processor to handle a request while the other
processor is "busy". If Linux and hyperthreading can do that, then a
hyperthreading CPU would be fine. Context switching is an issue on this
traveling workstation - there will be some realtime visuals that must
not "blip" when a (for instance) cron job starts - especially when
slocate starts.

However, I'm more comfortable with the performance of an SMP system, and
I would have to do a lot more qualifying with a hyperthreaded system to
make sure it does what I want. So, the vendor would have to either be
able to take the system back if there are problems with the app, or
replace it with a true SMP system.

--Bruce

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