Description of problem: Sun Microsystems ships an ever-growing family of opteron based systems, which will shortly ship with dual-core opteron support. Dual-core opteron support has become reasonably performant in the 2.6.11-rc3 linux kernel or later (see the quote below). Further work on scheduler optimization is apparently also occurring this quarter at SuSE. This bug requests that this support be added to RHEL4 U1 (and RHEL3 updates if possible). Note that it is definitely not desired that the node-interleaving bios option be mandatory to boot on x86_64 dual-node machines. === The 2.6.11-rc3 Linux kernel from kernel.org is the preferred Linux kernel. It should run on all dual-core machines with properly configured BIOSes. It is stable, and provides relatively good performance. The scheduler is not completely aware of dual-core processors, and will tend to cluster threads and processors onto 1-2 nodes, instead of spreading them out to maximize the number of memory controllers. SUSE/Novell is working on this, and intends to have an improved patch by 3/1/2005. ==== Dual-core performance on current kernels is poor. If I build a 2.6.11 kernel, then it improves to what is expected. However, these kernel changes are not available in sles9. Note: SuSE Linux Pro 3 is scheduled to have a 2.6.11 based kernel.
While I agree that we should look into improving performance on dual core machines, this really is more of a business decision rather than just a technical issue. Please raise this feature request with your partner manager and/or TAM, or file it in Issue Tracker so it will receive the right attention at the management and business level. Adding features this big after a RHEL product has released is not something that can, or should, be done by just engineering.