Many computer systems are based on multiple processors, but not always in immediately obvious ways.
- Many of Intel's CPUs support a technology which they call hyper-threading, which is where the CPU is actually viewed by the system as two logical processors.
- Some of the most recent Intel/AMD CPUs actually consist of multiple physical processors inside a single package, these are known as dual core processors.
- Some high-end computer systems actually have multiple physical processors installed on specialised motherboards to provide a significant performance increase over a uniprocessor system. You'll probably know if you have such a system, since they aren't cheap.
In all of these cases, you need to select the appropriate kernel options to obtain optimum performance from these setups.
Code Listing 3.6: Configuration for multi-processing |
Processor type and features ---> |