I couldn’t tell where to post this. My system is already installed. So here it is. There used to be different kernels in the package manager but the smp delineation seems to be absent now. Which kernel is the best one for such a machine as described in the title of this post and is there anything I should do to get the most out of it after it’s up and running?
Once it’s up and running is there any way to tweak the system utilization of such a processor or is that all done with the bios?
It’s a Phenom 2 x4 965 running openSUSE 12.2 64 bit. The system has installed kernel-desktop automatically.
Kernel-Desktop is normal and unless you have extraordinary needs the best for general desktop usage. It supports multiprocessors just fine. The special SMP kernel has long gone out of style. All now support SMP processors. I’d go with 64bit though since the 32 bit has memory limitations on more then 3 gig processes.
The two main openSUSE kernels are kernel-default and kernel-desktop. On 64-bit both have support for modern machines using SMP/SMT. The only difference is that kernel-desktop enables features that allow for faster responsiveness for multimedia and desktops.
isn’t kernel-desktop installed by default ?
Unless we upgrade using zypper dup from one version to another and we had default kernel version previously?
Yes, you can modify and set processor/core affinity for individual processes/applications but that is usually more of an Enterprise configuration when you want to ensure resource availability for certain apps on a potentially heavily loaded machine running multiple apps.
For ordinary use, the default scheduler should do a good job making any and all your running apps “play nice” with each other.
The way I unerstand it, kernel-Desktop is a the default installed kernel specially patched by openSUSE for various reasons.
I have the unpatched version running on my system because those patches which are normally beneficial get in the way of special software and compute/vm environments like CUDA but these special sitions should never be encountered by ordinary Users.