Hi all,
We consulted Jeremy Kerr about this. He says that an SMP kernel will run
on all 32 bit powerpc platforms, including non-SMP.
To clarify: the hardware supported by the powerpc and powerpc-smp
flavours is almost identical. The differences probably don't matter
Ubuntu users, as it'll be obscure hardware. I've CC-ed benh in case he
wants to correct me on this one.
However, the SMP kernel supports (surprise!) bringing up >1 CPU on
machines that have >1 CPU. With a UP kernel on these machines, the other
CPUs are left doing nothing.
The main class of 32-bit SMP powerpc machines are the Apple dual-G4s.
So, since the hardware coverage is essentially the same, but we get SMP
support on SMP machines, I'd say that we would prefer the powerpc-smp
kernel over the powerpc flavour.
The drawback is that UP machines have a little overhead for things like
spinlocks, which are compiled-out on the UP kernel.
I don't recall
discussing if the 64 bit SMP kernel would run on all SMP capable
hardware.
No, there's 32-bit SMP hardware that will not run a 64-bit kernel.
Cheers,
Jeremy
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