HP-UX

Everyone seemed to be a little stumped by the multicore question I asked earlier this week, so I decided I'd try a different angle.

Turns out that on a multicore system HP-UX reports every core as a seperate processor. All the usual commands (ioscan, top, etc.) report two processors for every one in a dual core system.

My question now is, can anyone tell me how to find out, from the command line, how many physical processors are on the system?

The problem is that I think you already have the correct answer. A dual core chip has two complete cpu's together with separate L1 caches. They do share a (huge) L2 cache, but I don't think that is enough to render one of them nonexistent. If HP-UX did not report each core as a separate processor, it would be broken.

After nearly a week of trying to figure this out, digging through reams of documentation, and going back and forth with the support hotline, I'm fairly sure you're right. But I'm just as sure that there are a large number of people out there with greater knowledge of HP-UX than me, so I had to ask.

I'll be more than happy to hear it if someone has an idea I haven't tried yet, but for now I guess I'm going with the answers I've got.

Sorry I replied to the earlier post.

Is your machine reporting an odd number of processors?

If this is really a gigantic issues open it up and count the things that look like aluminum quarts of milk

I have to be able to do this programmatically, Eronysis. On single-core and dual-core systems, which breaks the division idea . . . unless I want to report half a processor.

ioscan -k -C processor | grep processor | wc -l

returns you a nice integer.

Eronysis, you and me are jumping back and forth on different postings here, so I'm going to answer on just this one.

Yes, I have tried the ioscan command, as well as top, checking the syslog, and half a dozen others. But HP-UX 11 reports all the cores as seperate processors, which gives me the number of cores per box. But I ultimately need to be able to tell how many cores are on each processor, now and as technology advances. So I need to know how many physical processors are on the box, whether it's dual core, quad core, single core, or whatever.

So, thank you for trying, but ioscan doesn't do the job, and neither does anything else really, because it only gives me half the info I need.

parstatus would give me the rest of the info I need, but it only works on cell based and superdome systems.