What does smp mean?

[Nifty Hat Mitch]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 08:28:18PM -0500, Steven Pasternak wrote:
> On Thursday 27 January 2005 19:20, Leandro Melo wrote:
> > When i but my system, grub shows me 3 options for o.s. They are
> > - fedora core (2.6.5-1.358smp)
> > - fedora core up (2.6.5-1.358)
> > - other
> > What's a smp kernel? What are exactly the diferences between these 2
> > fedora versions?
...
> Symetric Mutli Processors. The smp is for a system running 2+
> processors....

Yes.

It is interesting to know that ASMP (asymmetric  multi processing)
is also possible.

The symmetric part tells you that each processor or virtual processor
(Intel HT technology) is used by the system as if it was an equal of
all the others.  Operating system functions (kernel) as well as
user activity can be assigned to any of the processors as they are
all equal (symmetric).  In reality some things like interrupts
tend to be vectored to a specific place so in operation some 
preferences in the OS do exist.

Some research has been done on systems where OS resides on a lesser
processor.  Even and IO or channel processor.  This makes sense when
the main processors are special purpose (yea) vector or even crypto
engines.  


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