On 15 Jul 1999, David Mentr'e wrote:
> Gordan Bobic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > I have recently obtained an old ICL machine (from around 1991/1992). It
> > has CPU boards with multiple processor slots. The processors installed are
> > 486DX/50 (2 of them), and the machine only has EISA bus (no PCI).
> [...]
> > At boot-up, the machine says that no SMP compliant motherboard has been
> > detected, and is says it will use the dummy emulation APIC. It also says
> > that it only foudn one CPU, CPU0.
>
> Linux uses MP1.[1|4] standard in BIOS to detect multiple processors
> availability. Your old machine certainly does not have this feature.
Intel's spec (from their web site) seems to imply that SMP is only
supported on Pentium+ class machines WITH a PCI bus. Is this true?
If PCI is required, the system could have been "fudged" together to
include the basic support, but without the PCI bus. Is this possible? I
have not tried putting both SMP and PCI support in the kernel, but I
intend to try...
I think I noticed on the default RH6 kernel that it detected something to
do with PCI, but when I re-compiled it to include support for SMP, I think
I took out PCI support...
> If
> you have hardware specification of it (that is to say how processors
> communicate between each other), you could try to hack smp support in
> linux, but I really doubt it is easy and worth it (except pure hacking
> value, of course ;-).
I have tried to hack about with the things on the surface, but it did
little other than cause kernel crashes whenever SMP was tried to be
accessed. I guess that more thorought hacks would be required, but as
don't have any information or manuals on the system (this was quite
literaly re-directed from the way to the skip to the boot of my car), that
might be quite difficult to do.
I have, however, been told that the machine used to run multi-processor
NT, or SCO UNIX for whatever that is worth...
Any further ideas, anyone?
Gordan
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