I didn’t really know where to post this since it’s not really a help question. Just more a request for information that I am to lazy to google or cannot really understand.
What are all those different types of kernel’s (Default, PAE, SMP, etc)? What’s different about them? Which one should I use on my Core 2 Duo machine at home?
At the moment like many I use the default versions. Will any of the others make my computer work better? Can I just switch without penalty or will it kill my pc?
Gee, that’s a lot of questions. Anyways, can anyone shed any light on any of them?
During the install there is a phase of hardware detection where all that is deduced and automatically setup for you – those being the software instruction sets of the cpu and the memory you have available,etc.
If I were to want to explore the issue. I would determine the instruction set of my cpu and the amount of RAM, then search the forum for the better kernel type. BTW, if you are into video big-time, have a look look at the kernel-rt.
SMP - Symmetric multiprocessing, when you have > 1 core. Even hyperthreading appears like > 1 core. I think you will not see this in newer releases because they have worked out how to make the same kernel work for both SMP and monoprocessor with little penalty. So default is both for mono and SMP now.
PAE - Kernel that can handle > 4GB of memory. That’s what the OS can manage, processes are still limited to about 3+GB. Note that there is no PAE for 64-bit processors, obviously.
XEN - A kernel specially built to be run under the XEN hypervisor.
