On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 10:05:40AM -0600, Rahul Nabar wrote: > Has anyone seen this problem before? I have dual socket Nehalems with > twin quad core chips. When I booted the OS it showed only 4 cores. I > went to the BIOS and found under Processor Settings the entry > Cores-per-processor set to "Dual"
This is not intentional. There are several ways to resolve this. A) Go into BIOS SETUP and change Processor Settings, Cores per processor from "Dual" to "All" and reboot. B) Use Dell Deployment Toolkit. The SYSCFG command can reset this value. From the documentation: SYSCFG --cpucore 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, all This option controls the number of enabled cores in each processor. The default value is set to the maximum number of cores per processor. Example: A:>syscfg --cpucore=1 Documentation at http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/dtk/3_2/cli/pdf/DTKCLIMR.pdf Deployment Toolkit can be downloaded from support.dell.com. DTK runs under several environments, including WinPE and Linux. C) Use Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA). The omconfig command can reset this value. From the documentation: omconfig mainsystem biossetup attribute=cpucore setting=1 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 |all 1: Enables one core per processor. 2: Enables two cores per processor. 4: Enables four cores per processor. 6: Enables six cores per processor. 8: Enables eight cores per processor. 10: Enables ten cores per processor. 12: Enables twelve cores per processor. all: Enables the maximum cores per processor. Documentation at http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/svradmin/6.2/en/CLI/PDF/CLIUG.pdf Example: $ sudo omconfig mainsystem biossetup attribute=cpucore setting=all OMSA can be downloaded from support.dell.com or from the hardware repository on http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/ . OMSA runs under several environments, including fully Dell Supported operating systems. D) Under Linux, use smbios-token-ctl to change the value. smbios-token-ctl is available in the smbios-utils-python package from your from your favorite Linux distribution, or from EPEL if using RHEL{4,5}. Install using 'sudo yum install smbios-utils-python' or equivalent for your distribution. Example: $ sudo yum install smbios-utils-python $ sudo /usr/sbin/smbios-token-ctl --activate -i 0x026e When using any of the above methods, after a reboot, you'll see all your cores. > Why is such an entry present in the first place? For specific application performance reasons, and on occasion for specific software licensing reasons, it may be desirable to disable cores at the BIOS level rather than the OS level. Thanks, Matt -- Matt Domsch Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
