--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: with the cost of multiple cpu motherboards going down i was wondering if anyone has created a super debian system?
allan ps what apps are you runnning? --- end of quoted material --- Yes, I have. 2xPPro 200/256k on a Tyan S1662D, 128M RAM. I pulled the hard drives from my old 486 and plugged them into the new system - presto! instant power! I did have a little trouble because I put the two hard drives on separate busses, so my Linux drive moved from hdb to hdc, but that was a detail. You do need to recompile the kernel after uncommenting the SMP=1 line at the top of "Makefile" in /usr/src/linux/ (use make-kpkg for this) and reboot with the new kernel, and you need to remove all references to "setserial" from /etc/init.d. Otherwise, no more trouble than installing Debian on a single processor box, which is to say, easy. The usual caveats with quality hardware go double with a multiple CPU setup, but that's important for a trouble-free setup under any circumstances. One thing I have noticed is that the X server will run on 1 CPU, while your application will run on the other. This helps everything. Programs which I know aren't multithreaded still go over 100% CPU usage when the X Server is involved. For two CPU bound tasks (the RSA datasecurity challenge program is a prime example), top reports 99.9% CPU usage for one process and 97.9% CPU usage for the other. I'm not going to complain about that :-). For two memory intensive programs the efficiency drops quite a bit, but is still faster than a 2 processor Sun Sparc Ultra (also at 200Mhz) with the same program. My understanding is that Pentium based multi-CPU boards lose even more due to the shared cache vs. the on chip cache of the PPro. Bottom line: efficiency varies, and how good it works out for you depends a lot on what you want to do with it. Try before you buy, with your applications, if you can. Personally, I just got this box a couple of weeks ago and haven't really done much with it yet. I've been busy teaching this term and haven't had time to play. However, I do have some research problems to work on, which is why I bought this box in the first place; I'll be using custom-written software for that. Oh, and BTW, it is *real* nice to be able to run TeX at light speed. I haven't really found any Debian-specific issues with a multi-CPU setup; they seem to be Linux issues, and the linux-smp mailing list (send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "subscribe linux-smp", without quotes, in the body of the message to subscribe) is a good place to get many of those questions answered. Good luck, and feel free to ask for more help if you do decide to go SMP. Stephen Ryan Team-OS/2 Debian GNU/Linux Mathematics graduate student, Dartmouth College
