Turn off hyperthreading on dual core Atom?

[Mark Felder]

On Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:24:08 -0500, Brett Glass <brett at lariat.net> wrote:

> With hyperthreading, the FreeBSD scheduler simply acts as if there are 4  
> CPUs. Each "CPU" gets clock interrupts (which add overhead), and the  
> scheduler is naive about the fact that two of the "CPUs" are not  
> separate chips and could be held up if its mate has a heavy load. I do  
> not know if the supposed higher utilization of the resources on each  
> chip (including executing one thread while the CPU waits for data for  
> another) is worth it. What has your experience been?

In my experience hyperthreading is useful in very few environments. I
personally disabled it on my Atom machine which acts as a NAS among
other things. I have noticed an improvement in performance and also in
responsiveness. YMMV, etc etc etc :-)


Regards,


Mark