Name
SMP — Symmetric multi-processing support
Description
This enables support for systems with more than one CPU. If you have
a system with only one CPU, like most personal computers, say no. If
you have a system with more than one CPU, say yes.
If you say no here, the kernel will run on single and multiprocessor
machines, but will use only one CPU of a multiprocessor machine. If
you say yes here, the kernel will run on many, but not all,
singleprocessor machines. On a singleprocessor machine, the kernel
will run faster if you say no here.
Note that if you say yes here and choose architecture 586 or
Pentium under Processor family, the kernel will not work on 486
architectures. Similarly, multiprocessor kernels for the PPro
architecture may not work on all Pentium based boards.
See also
Documentation/smp.txt,
Documentation/i386/IO-APIC.txt,
Documentation/nmi_watchdog.txt, and the
SMP-HOWTO available at
https://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto.