What i meant was, in a multicore system with 'n' number of cpu's, will each cpu have its own linux kernel installed, or will all cpu's have a copy of the same kernel image?
Another question regarding multicore is kernel tracing. Since tracing works at the kernel level, then should i perform tracing for each cpu's seperately or kernel tracing can be performed as a whole for all cpu's put-together?
All CPU's share the same memory system and there is only one copy of Linux loaded. Each running process will have its own stack, but this is true on single-CPU systems as well.
Strace is implemented via ptrace which I believe works on individual PID's, so I think this means it will only trace a single thread's execution.
You will have one kernel image, with sections of the code executed across the number of cores/cpu's. This will vary depending on the kernel switches/how was it compiled.
In relation to kernel tracing, you will still have one tracing!
Remember the same singular kernel will be executed by multiple cpus/cores...
Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.
Thank you all for your answers. I did a little research myself and found that both are possible in multicore systems. A SMP multicore system will have a single linux kernel for all the cores, where as in an AMP multicore system, each core will have its own kernel. Typically,some multicores will have couple of cores for AMP performing real time critical tasks, and the rest will be SMP performing non critical and normal tasks.
The question, i asked is about kernel tracing. Nowadays, most kernels come with inbuilt kprobes that will allow kernel developers to get information about the kernel performance. I guess, the answer to the first question also solves this question. In a SMP, a single trace for a kernel will be generated where as in AMP, as many traces as the number of cpu's will be generated.
AMP stands for Asymmetric Multi Processing, SMP stands for Symmetric Multi Processing