> I know Gentoo is Linux and Linux has SMP support. As I stated, I run a dual-933 SMP 
> system presently. But, how in the heck do you pick up 4CPUs with HyperThreading? I 
> thought HT was a memory-specific technology, not CPU? And do you actually see any 
> significant performance gains with your illusion of 4 CPUs? I wonder ...

I have noticed major performance boosts with HT. When you choose SMP as
you compile the kernel, the kernel will automagically find 4 CPU's
instead of 2. You can verify this in /proc/cpuinfo. There is a MAKEOPTS
flag in /etc/make.conf that is worth looking at, it will help only when
emerging things, but helpful I think. My system seems faster after I
changed it to -j5, but I didn't measure things...

HT will help you mainly if you have many threads. I am doing a lot with
Java application servers that create boatloads of threads and my
performance seems to really benefit from HT. I heard that 2.6 kernels
have better support for HT, but I haven't read much definitive...

Lloyd




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