Upgrading the RedHat 7.2 kernel on a PE-2650

[Philip Rowlands]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Alex St. Amand wrote:

>My company (Trebia Networks, Inc.) has purchased a Dell PowerEdge 2650 with
>dual 2.4GHz Xeon processors with the intention of testing its performance as
>an ASIC chip simulation tool.  We need to patch the kernel on it to 2.4.9-21
>or later to support Hyper Threading on the Xeon processors (this information
>is directly from RedHat support).

Do you have the Redhat errata packages? The current Redhat-provided
kernel for 7.2 is 2.4.9-31. So you shouldn't need to patch or
(re)compile anything yourself.

>Without it, our jobs seem to ping pong
>back and forth on the first physical CPU (which is representing itself as
>two in the OS - RedHat also confirmed this to be true).  We have already
>successfully installed RedHat 7.2 (kernel 2.4.7-10) on the system (using the
>Dell recommended aacraid install method).  RedHat 7.3 is not an option as
>our tools are not qualified on this version (nor is the Dell).

I suggest you bend your rules and try 7.3 - it just might work. Lying to
your app vendor when needed is not unusual IMHO...

If you haven't done already, I suggest you read the recent archives of
this list:
http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/

There's plenty of stuff about hyperthreading. Perhaps you just need the
acpismp=force kernel argument and enable hyperthreading in the BIOS?


Cheers,

Phil