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Date:      Fri, 6 Mar 2015 23:23:35 -0700
From:      Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To:        Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>
Cc:        Andriy Gapon <avg@freebsd.org>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: RFC: Simplfying hyperthreading distinctions
Message-ID:  <6E129CCC-C4CD-45A4-9945-3384A20B7A31@bsdimp.com>
In-Reply-To: <54FA5EE9.4090305@freebsd.org>
References:  <1640664.8z9mx3EOQs@ralph.baldwin.cx> <54FA5EE9.4090305@freebsd.org>

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> On Mar 6, 2015, at 7:14 PM, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> =
wrote:
>=20
>=20
> On 03/06/15 12:44, John Baldwin wrote:
>> Currently we go out of our way a bit to distinguish Pentium4-era
>> hyperthreading from more recent ("modern") hyperthreading.  I suspect =
that
>> this distinction probably results in confusion more than anything =
else.
>> Intel's documentation does not make near as broad a distinction as =
far as I
>> can tell.  Both types of SMT are called hyperthreading in the SDM for =
example.
>> However, we have the astonishing behavior that
>> 'machdep.hyperthreading_allowed' only affects "old" hyperthreads, but =
not
>> "new" ones.  We also try to be overly cute in our dmesg output by =
using HTT
>> for "old" hyperthreading, and SMT for "new" hyperthreading.  I =
propose the
>> following changes to simplify things a bit:
>>=20
>>   1) Call both "old" and "new" hyperthreading HTT in dmesg.
>>=20
>>   2) Change machdep.hyperthreading_allowed to apply to both new and =
old HTT.
>>      However, doing this means a POLA violation in that we would now =
disable
>>      modern HTT by default.  Balanced against re-enabling "old" HTT =
by default
>>      on an increasingly-shrinking pool of old hardware, I think the =
better
>>      approach here would be to also change the default to allow HTT.
>>=20
>>   3) Possibly add a different knob (or change the behavior of
>>      machdep.hyperthreading_allowed) to still bring up hyperthreads, =
but leave
>>      them out of the default cpuset (set 1).  This would allow those =
threads
>>      to be re-enabled dynamically at runtime by adjusting the mask on =
set 1.
>>      The original htt settings back when 'hyperthreading_allowed' was
>>      introduced actually permitted this via by adjusting =
'machdep.hlt_cpus' at
>>      runtime.
>>=20
>> What do people think?
>=20
> I'm fine with whatever naming, but if we're making new sysctls, =
especially for the cpuset case, is there a reason to hide the behavior =
under machdep? We support at least three non-x86 CPUs with SMT (POWER8, =
Cell, and POWER5) and the relevant scheduling logic should be MI. At =
least POWER8 supports 8 threads per core, so you might also want more =
granularity than just "on" or "off=E2=80=9D.

MIPS has xlr/xlp support as well, which has threads=E2=80=A6

Warner


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