How is hyperthreading handled on amd64?
John Baldwin
jhb at freebsd.org
Mon Mar 13 15:52:08 UTC 2006
On Monday 13 March 2006 08:54, Bill Moran wrote:
>
> We've got some dell servers (Poweredge 2850 is specifically what
> the following tests were run on). Some of the behaviour we're
> seeing was unexpected. In particular, I'm rather fuzzy as to
> how an amd64 kernel handles hyperthreading. (Personally, I'm also
> a little fuzzy on whether this really is hyperthreading under amd64
> at all)
>
> After building a kernel with SMP, I do see 2 logical processors,
> and top(1) shows both of them doing their thing. However,
> machdep.hypterthreading_allowed is set to 0. Is the amd64 kernel
> ignoring this value, or is top(1) reporting incorrectly?
>
> Additionally, I'm not seeing the performance I'm accustomed to on
> hypterthreaded machines. Usually, throughput scales when hyperthreading
> is enabled and more than one process are fighting for CPU. In my
> tests, it seems as if there is no scaling whatsoever. i.e.: On
> a standard hyperthreaded machine, running 1 ubench might yield a
> CPU value of 100,000. Running two ubench simultaneously will usually
> result in each of them returning ~90,000 or so. With the amd64, I
> end up with each one around 50,000 - as if there were no second
> logical CPU (despite the fact that top(1) shows both in use).
>
> dmesg attached. I can provide more information on request.
Your dmesg is from a kernel that doesn't include 'options SMP' and is
thus only using 1 CPU.
--
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve" = http://www.FreeBSD.org
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