P4 Xeon summary inquiry

[J.A. Magallon]

Hi, all

I am trying to make a dual P4-Xeon box (P4DCE, Intel 869) work optimally.
After some search in list archives, I have found this points:

- You need ACPI, and boot with acpismp=force, to have hyperthreading
  (see 4 cpus)
- To balance interrupts, a patch from Ingo is needed
- To balance timers, one other patch was needed, but this in included
  in 2.4.19-pre8 (do not know since which pre is there)

I tried to boot with acpismp=force, but then performance was dog slow,
I could count lines scrolling on a rxvt.
I checked mtrr and look like working. Box has 1Gb of ram, so kernel
is using CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y.
Kernel is the standard highmem Mandrake kernel in 8.2
(2.4.18-6mdkenterprise) that is mainly a plain 2.4.18 with some
.19-pre1 fixes.

Any correction ? Any known problem in 2.4.18 about this issue that
has bee corrected in pres for 19 ?

Any idea about the performance loss ?

TIA

-- 
J.A. Magallon                           #  Let the source be with you...        
mailto:[e-mail]
Mandrake Linux release 8.3 (Cooker) for i586
Linux werewolf 2.4.19-pre8-jam1 #1 SMP dom may 5 23:46:04 CEST 2002 i686