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Date:      Fri, 24 Jan 2003 17:33:44 -0800
From:      Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@xcllnt.net>
To:        Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>
Cc:        John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>, Nate Lawson <nate@root.org>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org, Attila Nagy <bra@fsn.hu>
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/i386 identcpu.c initcpu.c locore.s
Message-ID:  <20030125013344.GA54764@dhcp01.pn.xcllnt.net>
In-Reply-To: <20030125012527.EE5542A89E@canning.wemm.org>
References:  <XFMail.20030124142224.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <20030125012527.EE5542A89E@canning.wemm.org>

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On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 05:25:27PM -0800, Peter Wemm wrote:
> John Baldwin wrote:
> > 
> > On 24-Jan-2003 Nate Lawson wrote:
> > > On Fri, 24 Jan 2003, Attila Nagy wrote:
> > >> Nate Lawson wrote:
> > >> > The patch merely enables an Auxiliary Processor on equipment that
> > >> > supports HTT.  Thus, 4.x still has all its original SMP weaknesses that
> > >> > will lead people (eventually) to 5.x including the fact that only one
> > >> > process can be active in the kernel at a time.
> > >>
> > >> And what about performance? I mean those "Auxiliary Processors" are
> > >> "weaker" than the real ones, so scheduling CPU intensive processes to them
> > >> makes a weird assymmetry. In average for example with a dnetc client
> > >> what's better? :)
> > >> Running two processes with HT turned off, or running four of them with HT
> > >> on?
> > > 
> > > I'm not sure what you mean by "weaker".  If you have code that is
> > > multi-process and it runs faster on an SMP system than a single CPU
> > > system, then it is likely to run faster with HTT than without.  Read the
> > > Intel pages to find more about HTT.
> > 
> > Maybe.  Preliminary buildworld tests on 4.x seem to suggest that HTT
> > is slower than UP, but buildworld is just one application.  HTT will
> > probably be optional on stable.  On -current we will eventually use
> > ACPI to enumerate CPU's which means that we will respect BIOS settings
> > with regards to whether or not HTT is enabled.
> 
> Did you remember to set machdep.cpu_idle_hlt to 1?  Failing to set this
> will really suck because the logical cores will be spinning like crazy and
> stealing execution resources from functional tasks on the other part of the
> cpu.

What about an increase in cache misses due to a degradation of locality
by having a larger, less coherent/dense working set?

-- 
 Marcel Moolenaar	  USPA: A-39004		 marcel@xcllnt.net

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