October_30th's Journal: [geektalk] A new niche Linux distribution?

It would be great if someone would have a go at creating a dedicated Linux distribution for SMP machines.

I am not an expert in parallel algorithms, but one would think that tools like gzip, bzip2 and the GNU tool-chain could be re-written so that they make better use of multiple CPUs.

It kind of sucks that compressing a 25.8 Gb backup file on a four-way machine with bzip2 utilizes only one of the CPUs.

Agreed

[Morosoph]

We're heading the way of SMP in spades, now. I'd like to get a PS3 sometime next year, and it would be nice if my OS could properly exploit the parallelism...

Multi-cores?

[Salvance]

Here's a dumb question ... does a linux program need to be specially written to utilize multiple cores as well as multiple processors, or does the multi-core processor somehow handle it auto-magically?

Re:

[October_30th]

The Linux kernel sees multi-cores as individual CPUs. I've got two dual-core Opterons and it shows up as a 4-way system in Linux.

The problem is that even though the kernel sees four CPUs, programs need to be written so that they recognize multiple CPUs and divide whatever problem they're working on into separate pieces. These individual pieces are then fed to CPUs.

For some problems this is trivial (I'd guess block compression falls in this category) and for some problems it's not.

Re:

[tqft]

make already has an option -j [n] to do stuff in parallel

If only my Dapper would do smp without borking - various chipsets for Intel Dual Core are causing problems