Installation guide

40 Chapter 4. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux

4.17.4. SMP Motherboards and GRUB

This section is speciﬁc to SMP motherboards only. SMP, short for Symmetric Multiprocessing, is a

computer architecture providing fast performance by making multiple CPUs available to complete

individual processes simultaneously (multiprocessing).

If the installation program detects an SMP motherboard on your system, it automatically creates two

boot loader entries.

Note

An SMP kernel is installed by default on Intel® Pentium® 4 systems with hyperthreading.

The two GRUB entries are Red Hat Enterprise Linux (kernel version) and Red Hat

Enterprise Linux (kernel version-smp). The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (kernel

version-smp) boots by default. However, if you have trouble with the SMP kernel, you can elect to

boot the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (kernel version) entry instead. You retain all the

functionality as before, but only operate with a single processor.

4.18. Network Conﬁguration

If you do not have a network device, this screen does not appear during your installation and you

should advance to Section 4.19 Firewall Conﬁguration.

Figure 4-16. Network Conﬁguration