Re: Disabling CPUs

On 2022-09-24 22:07 -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:

> Well, no joy. My BIOS had no ability to disable cores. Confirmed with Lenovo
> support. So no ability to do more than cpuset.

That really sucks.


> Yes, your system is much bigger than my little Lenovo T16 ThinkPad. I have 11
> "CPUs". I always quote those number as there are only cores with hyperthreading
> to look like 4 CPUs.

Yeah me too for the most part but I do find that HT helps a lot with compiling 
which I do a lot of.


> It may work, but I realized that my 8G of soldered memory is all I have until
> my Crucial order arrives with an added 16G of DDR4. I suspect that there might
> still be issues, but I won't know until there is enough RAM to actually load
> the system. I did see a very consistent  panic at the same place in the VM
> code, so it is probably easily traced down if more memory does not fix it.

That's great.  We'll probably have to chat some about this there are a few 
programs that I was hoping to get working under wine and one of them will not so 
I'll have to go the VM route which I haven't done in years.


> I'm already seeing sound issues, but I have not even looked at them at this
> point. This is my main system. Have not used a desktop system since I retired.

Is it similar to the ones I've been having?  If you turn verbose on you may get 
the same issues I did.  See the 2nd attachment on this ticket:

  https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263385


> It does appear that the cpuset processor setup does, largely stop the panics.
> Stll, the system is not really stable. With both Intel and AMD committed to
> mixed speed cores in this and the next generation, these issues are likely to
> get serious attention from kernel developers which I have not been since the
> end of the 70s when I programmed mostly in assembly on a variety of platforms.
> I suspect that serious work is underway. I hope it comes more quickly than
> getting graphics support on my 12 year old Sunny Bridge system where I had to
> live with VESA for about a year with a 3/4 aspect ratio stretched to fill the
> 9x16 screen. Really ugly.

Hopefully, I've been using this system since about May with the panics and poor 
audio sometimes it drives me crazy and I use my old workstation.  Losing those 
8 E-cores really hurts when doing long compiles.  I booted a Debian live CD and 
there were no issues with audio or the CPUs.

The CPU I have now is one of the ones where the graphics chip didn't come out 
right so it's disabled.  Small savings but I would haven't used it anyway.  
Thankfully the video card works extremely well so I can do my pytorch work with 
no issues.



> Thanks again for your help. I really appreciate it even if it doesn't resolve
> my issues.

No worries it doesn't seem there are many using Alder Lake right now on FreeBSD.  
Hopefully our chats on the topic attract others!


Amar.