ANYONE WHO DOUBTS that plans for the release of AMD"s Hammer are not far advanced need look no further than a release from SUSE Labs.
The labs said that 2.4.19pre4 based X86-64 linux kernel snapshot has now been released and describes it as a major update for the kernel.
The announcement said that it has so many bug fixes from the previous kernel that it is recommended that every X86-64 user (Intel too?) should upgrade to it.
What"s most interesting is that the 2.4 kernel is the stable tree, while the 2.5 kernel is the experimental programmers" tree, but both both will be synchronised soon.
There"s already Linux support for sound, IDE and USB 2.0 devices in the 8111 chipset, and the target architecture is Clawhammer rather than Sledgehammer.
The multiprocessing follows the SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) model and there"s no mention of Numa – which AMD seems to be against for political decisions.