do i need a bigsmp kernel?

i am trying to build a server for one of my customer.

the hardware is a HP ProLiant DL165, with an 8 core AMD Opteron 6128 and 4GB RAM. the server MUST run under Debian 5 (Lenny) due to a software dependency.

the standard Debian kernel does not support the 8 cores of the opteron and i am forced to use the nosmp boot option, which renders the processor quite useless by using only 1 core…

i read somewhere that i need a bigsmp kernel in order for my distro to support the 8 cores. is it true ? where can i find a bigsmp kernel for Debian 5 ? if i can’t find a ready-made one, how do i build a bigsmp kernel ? which config options are relevant ?

A 64-bit kernel shouldn’t have this problem. It will support all 8 cores. If you’re stuck with 32-bit for some reason, the BigSMP kernel is what you’ll need to make it work.

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