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Date:      Thu, 04 May 2006 17:54:24 -0400
From:      "Jonathan Noack" <noackjr@alumni.rice.edu>
To:        "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Hyperthreading in 6.x ... still frowned upon?
Message-ID:  <445A7810.5010702@alumni.rice.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20060503113955.U1147@ganymede.hub.org>
References:  <20060503113955.U1147@ganymede.hub.org>

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Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> In 4.x, it was a 'shut it off' sort of deal .. my new amd64 don't appear 
> to have it enabled, but my older i386 server that I just upgraded to 6.x 
> does:
> 
> user     pid %cpu %mem   vsz   rss   tt state start        time command
> root      14 104.0  0.0     0     8  ??  RL    11:38AM   0:55.02 [idle: 
> cpu0]
> root      11 99.1  0.0     0     8  ??  RL    11:38AM   0:00.00 [idle: 
> cpu3]
> root      13 99.1  0.0     0     8  ??  RL    11:38AM   0:00.00 [idle: 
> cpu1]
> root      12 98.0  0.0     0     8  ??  RL    11:38AM   0:54.54 [idle: 
> cpu2]
> 
> Is it still something that I should disable, and, if so, how in 6.x?

According to the 6.0 i386 Release Notes, you should use the 
machdep.hyperthreading_allowed sysctl to disable Hyper-Threading.

If you are concerned with security, you should disable it.  If you are 
more concerned with performance, you should test your workload 
with/without Hyper-Threading and choose the configuration which performs 
best.

-Jonathan



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