On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 07:19:06PM -0700, W Strater wrote: [confusing full-quoting snipped] >> In fact, if your processor has the "nx" bit (look in the "flags") line in >> /proc/cpuinfo, you will get a performance increase in system calls by using >> the SMP kernel even on single-processor systems. I don't recall the > Thanks for the help. The processor is a hyperthreading processor. Okay -- that explains it. Hyperthreading is good for many workloads, but actually a negative for others. If performance at a certain task is important for you, try testing with it on and with it off and see which is better. (It'll be a bios setting somewhere.) > I do not have the "nx" flag in /proc/cpuinfo. Here is the output for one > of the CPUs since the listing are virtually identical. Okay. In that case, if you decide to not use hyperthreading, you may want to use the non-smp kernel for a very marginal performance gain. [...] > I got my self into this problem because I downloaded kernel.devel to build > a VPN client not realizing there was a separrate source code for the SMP > kernel. Needless to say, I could not install the module I built and went > looking for the culprit. There is not a separate source code for the SMP kernel. It is simply a build option. What VPN client are you trying to build? Is it the glue layer for the Cisco VPN client? If so, have you tried using the user-space and open source "vpnc" instead? -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
