Re: [Bugme-new] [Bug 7495] New: Kernel periodically hangs.

[Dave Jones]

On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 03:16:38PM +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
 > 
 > > > We KNOW it can't work on a sizable amount of machines.  This is why it
 > > > is a config option; you can enable it if YOUR machine is KNOWN to work,
 > > > and you get some gains. But it's also understood that it often it won't
 > > > work. So any sensible distro (since they have to aim for a wide
 > > > audience) disables this option ...
 > > 
 > > Nowadays, many distributions only ship CONFIG_SMP=y kernels...
 > 
 > that's a calculated risk on their side (and they know that); they're
 > balancing not functioning on a set of machines off against needing more
 > kernels.

Andi has a nice patch in the suse kernel which adds heuristics to disable
apic on systems where it isn't likely to work.  It DTRT in at least
one problem case that I know of.   The actual fall-out from enabling
'run SMP kernels on UP i686' for FC6 has mostly been a non-event.
Literally a handful of cases, that will likely all get caught and worked
around by Andi's patch or similar.

		Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
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