Re: SMP kernel on non-SMP machines?

Kurt Garloff (K.Garloff@ping.de)
Mon, 4 Jan 1999 14:25:18 +0100

On Sun, Jan 03, 1999 at 10:38:10AM -0600, Joseph W. Breu wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Jan 1999, Tuan Hoang wrote:
>
> > I've got a bunch of machines (about 20) to install Linux on and
> > I was wondering if it is safe to install a SMP kernel,
> > on a few non-SMP machines. This would save me the hassle and
> > time with compiling for each machine. In other words,
> > I want to have one universal kernel across all of my machines.
>
> I actually did this by mistaked and I didn't have a single
> problem. YMMV though.

Normally, SMP kernels work just fine on UP machines.
There once was a problem reported for Cyrix6x86 chips, but I think this one
was fixed.

Note, that SMP kernels have to do locking etc. to avoid race conditions.
This will make your kernel bigger and a little bit slower for some things.

-- 
Kurt Garloff <kurt@garloff.de>                           [Dortmund, FRG]  
Plasma physics, high perf. computing              [Linux-ix86,-axp, DUX]
PGP key on http://www.garloff.de/kurt/        [Linux SCSI driver: DC390]


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