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rollcat 6 days ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned OpenBSD yet.

They've been advocating against SMT for a long while, citing security risks and inconsistent performance gains. I don't know which HW/CPU bug in the long series of rowhammer, meltdown, spectre, etc prompted the action, but they've completely disabled SMT in the default installation at some point.

The core idea by itself is fine: keep the ALUs busy. Maybe security-wise, the present trade-off is acceptable, if you can instruct the scheduler to put threads from the same security domain on the same physical core. (How to tell when two threads are not a threat to each other is left up as an exercise.)

saagarjha 6 days ago | parent [-]

The security argument might make sense but OpenBSD is not really the place to take performance advice from

rollcat 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

My original point stands, also per TFA - performance gains from SMT are questionable for certain workloads. Whether OpenBSD prioritises absolute performance is besides the point - they benchmark against their own goals, not someone else's achievements.

whizzter 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Do people even use or mention OpenBSD out of performance concerns? We all know they prioritize security.