[ale] Trouble with new Pentium D

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 09:44 -0500, Chuck Huber wrote:

> 
> If it is a 64-bit machine, will I have to replace all the applications
> with 64-bit versions?  (vmware and winxp being the most problematic).
> 
> Any ideas would be helpful.


Well, at least on the two machines that I have that are 64-bit, you can
run 32-bit operating systems on them.  Erica has a 64-bit Intel (you can
tell these when you boot up by seeing if it says anything like "EM64T"
on the screen; that's Intel's name for their 64-bit x86 CPU.  I have
even run 16-bit software (FreeDOS, anyone) on an AMD64 without any
issues.

Her machine is a Pentium 4, but as I understand the Intel line of CPUs,
your Pentium D should be just like the P4 she has, but if it is 64-bit,
than with two 64-bit cores.

The way that 64-bit x86 processors work, by the way, is that they are
backwards compatible with the existing x86 CPUs in terms of
functionality.  They do, however, have something called long mode that,
when entered, turns off some of the backwards compatible functionality
(e.g., you can't get a VM86 session in 64-bit long mode).  That's also
where the newer 64-bit instructions are available.

Question:  Are you attempting to boot an SMP capable kernel?  I don't
have really any experience with dual-core and multiple-CPU SMP systems
(under Linux anyway) other than reading about them.  Is it possible that
you have a uniprocessor kernel that is doing something strange when it
sees two CPUs?

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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