Quotes of the week

[Posted April 7, 2010 by corbet]

4208 files changed, 3717 insertions(+), 717 deletions(-)

-- Tejun Heo casts a wide net for -rc4

I have two machines that show very different performance numbers. After digging a little I found out that the first machine has, in /proc/cpuinfo:

model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.00GHz

while the other has:

model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz

and that seems to be the main difference. Now the problem is that /proc/cpuinfo is read only. Would it be possible to make /proc/cpuinfo writable so that I could do:

echo -n "model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz" > /proc/cpuinfo

in the first machine and get a performance similar to the second machine?

-- Paulo Marques

It's probably buggy as hell, I don't dare try to actually boot the crap I write.

-- Linus Torvalds

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 8, 2010 5:10 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (3 responses)

FYI for other readers: Paulo Marques' post was made on April 1.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 8, 2010 9:31 UTC (Thu) by Leonid99 (subscriber, #23962) [Link]

Thanks, Cap.

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 8, 2010 12:31 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Damn! That explains why my attempts to switch to an OpenBSD IA64 system didn't work (by echoing appropriate values into /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/sys/kernel/ostype, of course).

(I know that IA64 support is not available in OpenBSD: I was hoping this would write the code for me, so I could contribute it. No such luck.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Apr 8, 2010 16:36 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

In order to make changing architecture with "echo" work, you need to start with a multi-arch port. Obviously, when the write to "/proc/cpuinfo" completes, it will start using a different instruction set from the one it started with (and what's then in the other files), and most of the ports don't support this. I'd suggest starting with the zaurus port, although that does mean you'll have to worry about someone misplacing your supercomputer.