On 9/6/06, Paul Stear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Perhaps I didn't express myself correctly. I thought that you could rum an athlon 64 as 2 32's enabling smp and installing all programs under x86. If this is correct I would like to know the correct steps to take. i.e. would I need to start from scratch or use my current setup and compile the kernel (as what?)
Hi, I'm not sure I understand you right, but you can use both cores no matter if you run 32 or 64 bit. To do that you just have to enable SMP support in the processor configuration menu of the kernel configuration (make menuconfig), and also Multicore scheduling support in the same menu, which just makes it do a better job at making scheduling decisions. Then you just restart and see it's working through getting 2 penguins at the beginning or doeing cat /proc/cpuinfo and seeing 2 processors. And whether you use 32 or 64 bit fully depends on if you used the x86 or the amd64 cd and stages to install gentoo. Apparently there is not much difference in performance, personally I went 64 bit because I found it silly to buy a 64 bit processor and then not use it fully, and apart from flash there's really nothing at all not working. (technically you can get flash to work if you don't mind using a 32 bit browser as well ie. firefox-bin) I hope this helps.
Paul
Cheers, Friedrich Göpel -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
