Multi-processor information

Daniel McNamara daniel at cit-linux.net
Sun Jan 20 15:35:29 EST 2002


Hi Guys,

Well over the weekend I became the owner of a dual PII machine. I'm just a
little confused about how multi-processor systems work so if I could get
some clarifications that would be great.

I understand that to take advantage of the dual processors my kernel will
need multi-processor support built in. What I don't fully understand is how
applications will take advantage of them. Do they just pass calls to the
kernel and it takes care of it? Or does the program itself also have to be
compiled with support for multi-processing?

To give a specific example I intend to turn this machine into a web server
for my work place. With Apache, will I need to compile from source and
change a flag to let it know that it will be running on a multi-processor
system? Or will it just be fine as is and the kernel will work it out?

I have done a quick search on the Apache web site but not really found
anything to point in the right direction. If anyone could supply links or
general information on this it would great.

Cheers

Daniel





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