openSuSE 10.3 - Xeon MP not showing multiple cores

English Hardware
#1

Hi,

I recently bought a recycled HP DL760 with 8 x Xeon 2.7Ghz Processors. Installed openSuSE 10.3, all is going nicely, I see 8 cores, but I have been told (by the chap I got it from) that MS DataCenter sees the full complement of 16 cores.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a known glitch? Is there a fix?

Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards

#2

Hi & welcome,

Linux should scale to 32 CPU cores as far as I know… I’ve never gone past 8 cores (2x Quad cores) in one server, so don’t know for sure.

I think the 64bit version of Linux even scales up to 64 CPU’s.

Did you install the 32bit version of openSUSE or 64bit?
I would definitely recommend going for the 64bit with the 32bit libraries installed if not already so.

Cheers,
Wj

#3

Hi WJM,

Thanks for the reply, I use the 64bit version on many of my machines (mainly desktops if I’m honest) but the processors are Intel Xeon MP’s, so they are 32 bit.

Like you, I had always understood that openSuSE should easily scale to this level, so I was surprised to only see 8 cores.

Thanks for your response anyway.

Kind regards

#4

dave corpdata wrote:
> Hi WJM,
>
> Thanks for the reply, I use the 64bit version on many of my machines
> (mainly desktops if I’m honest) but the processors are Intel Xeon MP’s,
> so they are 32 bit.
>
> Like you, I had always understood that openSuSE should easily scale to
> this level, so I was surprised to only see 8 cores.

In kernel 2.6.26, the MAX_CPUS parameter is set to 16 for x86 and 32 for PPC.
AFAIK, all that would need to be done to get more would be to edit that
parameter and recompile the kernel.

Larry