On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Leonardo Dias wrote: > > was improving. Does anyone know what the state of it is? Is potato's SMP > > better than slink? I would think it is a function of the kernel, not the > > distro, but I could be wrong. > > You are wrong. SMP is totally written in the kernel. But your doubt has > values, because SMP has been implementated only in kernel v2.2, which > was distributed only in newest distros.
SMP is implemented in 2.0.x kernels. Some kernels are better at it than others, and sometimes you have to edit the kernel Makefile to get SMP support (this is all explained in the SMP HOWTO). The trouble with SMB in 2.0.x is not that it is unstable, but that it isn't very efficient. If your processes are CPU-intensive, and/or you have only 2 CPU's, you will be fine, but for processes that do lots of system calls or I/O they tend to spend a lot of time waiting for kernel locks. But this is not disastrous, just suboptimal. It is much better in 2.2.
