Identification of HTT cores on newer (CPUID leaf 11) Intel processors

[Andrew Boyer]

On Sep 16, 2011, at 8:07 AM, John Baldwin wrote:
> I think the "right" way for an admin to disable HTT is to disable it in the
> BIOS so that it doesn't show up in the MADT.  Back when we were doing the
> MPTABLE_FORCE_HTT hack having a separate tunable made sense (and it possibly
> made some limited sense if you were worried about the vulnerability on running
> machines).  However, at this point I think the tunable should just go away and
> admins should configure HTT on or off in the BIOS like they would for any
> other OS.
> 
> -- 
> John Baldwin


To do it this way (leave SMT enabled in the BIOS but disabled in the OS) makes it easier to release a future upgrade to take advantage of those cores.  Once systems are distributed to customer sites it becomes very difficult to do BIOS maintenance.

-Andrew

--------------------------------------------------
Andrew Boyer	aboyer at averesystems.com