Barcelona, anyone?

[Gilboa Davara]

On 8/15/07, David Timms <dtimms at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > On 8/12/07, Dave Stevens <geek at uniserve.com> wrote:
> >> Hello, the list;
> >>
> >> The AMD news about the upcoming Barcelona release says it will run on RHEL 5.
> >> Does that imply (or does anyone have experience to show) that F7 will run on
> >> it ok?
> >>
> >> Dave
> >>
> >
> > Barring motherboard/chipset problems (which - given the use of the
> > existing socket F platform - should be pretty rare) - Barcelona CPUs
> > should work out of box on both Fedora and RHEL/CentOS.
> >
> Correct me if I'm wrong:
> RHEL 5 came from the development that was released as FC6.
> FC6 and F7 receive newer kernels soon after they are released, while
> RHEL 5 gets mainly/only gets security back ports.
>
> So it would seem more likely that if the one distro doesn't work with
> the new CPU, it is more likely to be the older RHEL 5.
>
> DaveT.

True, but  by design, multi-core CPUs behave exactly like normal SMP
machines. (with "more" sockets)
RHEL5 may be unable to access new core extensions (E.g. new
SSEn/3DNow, Better Cool & Quiet, VT/SVN extensions, etc) or may not be
able to detect the CPU family/version under /proc/cpuinfo, but it
should boot just fine and detect all the cores. *, **.

- Gilboa
* As long as number of the cores then does not exceed the complied-in
NR_CPUS value inside the kernel.
** Wrongly detecting the number of cores - per socket, might exceed
the license - though I assume that RedHat will release a kernel fix
once such problem is detected.