Today a colleague noted to me that Ubuntu doesn't load SMP by default. Could it be possible that I am not running my system at full speed yet?! That would be insain! Come to think of it, I did use the i386 kernel (because I had it laying around (yes, I am very lazy)), and my current /proc/cpuinfo contains only 1 cpu. After some looking in to it, I found that it is really simple to update the kernel to support multi processing. After a restart, it immediately worked (wow!), just see my new /proc/cpuinfo. Also, gkrellm updated itself to show 2 cpu graphs. Now that's a sight for sore eyes!
The results for the performance are difficult to measure. SuperPi, for instance, is just as fast as before (1m in under 14 sec.), but it's only running on one core. I also tried MultiPi, but it only detects one cpu. But I suppose it's good news that, running both programs at the same time, both cores take up 100%, and SuperPi still takes under 14 sec for 1m decimals. :-) by Martin @ 12:56 25 September 2006