[ale] multi processing?

Dana Powers dana at slothlovechunk.org
Sat Oct 5 23:22:12 EDT 2002


The main distinction in the intel line is between the 286 and the 386.
Before the 386, the x86 chips did not have effective memory addressing
support to allow a true multi-tasking OS like linux. What you refer to as
'Multi-processing' is managed by the OS itself, and specifically the
scheduler process, which is software. So in this case, its always software
processing. I am not aware of a significant change in the intel pentium
chips, but that being said, you will almost always see performance gains in
various areas if you recompile your software for your particular
processor/architecture . This is especially true of the kernel. Either way,
most default linux kernels expose essentially the same functionality to
userland programs regardless of what architecture they are optimized for. I
believe that MS operating systems were not entirely multi-tasking until
after the pentium was released, however; but Im not an ms guru, so this
could totally be off.

hth
dpk

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Turner" <artic_knight at yahoo.com>
To: ale at ale.org
To: <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 9:10 PM
Subject: [ale] multi processing?


> hey, i was curious, ive read how before the pentium there was no
> multiprocessing other than what software could manage, so my question is,
> if i compile linux for a 386 and i run it on a pentium, does it take
> advantage of multiprocessing? or just run the software processing?
>
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