[3700] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: A couple quick Linux questions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Camilla R Fox)
Wed Aug 28 19:14:14 2002
To: Jay Lulla <jlulla@genmatrix.com>
cc: linux-help@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
Reply-to: linux-help@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 28 Aug 2002 15:29:36 PDT."
<3D6D4ED0.A7DEFE0A@genmatrix.com>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 19:14:02 -0400
From: Camilla R Fox <cfox@MIT.EDU>
I'm going to answer this on linux-help@mit.edu, since it isn't suitable
for linux-dev@mit.edu.
> First, can we install "Athena Linux" even if we no longer have Athena
> accounts?
> Ie - is this Linux version for general use on a PC?
There's nothing stopping you, but it's not really suitable, since the
use of many of the services will be unavailable to you. I'd recommend
you install redhat or debian, instead; much of the software available
on Athena is packaged for other linux distributions.
Non-volunteer support from MIT isn't available to you any more. You'd be
better off with something that has support from another entity.
In any case, you need to think about what you expect to get out of your
install, and read the documentation associated with various distributions
carefully, to establish which will best suit your needs.
> Second, I have a general question about running processes on a PC that
> has
> more than one microprocessor. If you have a Linux (or Unix) machine that
> has 2 microprocessors, is there a command you can use to run a program
> on a
> specific one? Let's say I have a program called 'run-me'. When I run
> 'run-me',
> it appears that it divides its CPU resources, yet most of its
> resources are used from processor #1. Is there a way
> to run 'run-me' a second time, so that it's running twice, each
> thread/process on a different microprocessor?
This is up to the kernel's scheduler; the "symmetric" in "SMP" means that
both processors are treated essentially the same, and different programs
(or threads) are scheduled time separately.
Unless your program is threaded, you'd have to run two copies of it,
to take advantage of both processors. If you run two copies of it, one
will ordinarily use each processor. You don't get fine grained control.
