I have no idea what I am talking about so I'll make it short and sweet.
Can I utilize multiple cores using fasm?

Short and sweet answer:
Yes.

So can I control what instructions gets executed on each core?

Are you thinking... Windows? Real mode? Somehting else?

How about Linux/Windows, protected mode, user space?

In Windows, you make the application multithreaded. I'm not sure, but you might be able to select which thread goes to which core.

Not my area, but I think Protected mode = Real mode when it comes to multiprocessing. Ask the people over at the OS Construction board for those.

Ok, so I'm basically in the hands of the OS threads then

If you're not going to run OS-less, yes.

Have you ever made a mt program in another language? I would suggest it. If you have, then you are probably already familiar with a threading API. The APIs are the same as always. The most commonly used are WinAPI for Windows, and pthreads for *nix. With WinAPI, you can set the cpu affinity, but I don't know how strict it is, or if there s a Linux parallel.

Yea I'm familiar with those.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_affinity Linux seems to have something similar. But as you said, it doesn't seem to be very strict, and I get the impression I'm better off leaving it to the OS scheduler to decide.

So you know how to use pthreads(or your threading lib of choice)? All you have to do from there is call them like you call libc(assuming you know how to import symbols), or anything else.

If you need help with threading using a specific lib, you'll probably want to go to a more relevant sub-forum to the thread lib's native OS. There's also lots of tutorials on threading in C, that are easy to understand in terms of how you could use the concepts presented, in assembly.

There are times where you have to do this, for instance measuring approximate core temperatures in a multi-core cpu.

Windows has SetThreadAffinityMask

@Tyler
I am familiar with using threads in C++. If I have any questions about using it in fasm I'll certainly be posting in the relevant OS forum



The reason I wanned to know is basically that I consider writing a high level language compiler using fasm as the backend, and I was wondering about having builtin threading capabilities and possibly more fine grained control of execution. I guess thread affinity could come in handy as an advanced language feature.



Thanks