[LAU] How to turn off hyperthreading?

Louis Gorenfeld louis.gorenfeld at gmail.com
Mon Mar 25 20:23:42 UTC 2013


Hi David,
  I have seen hyperthreading cause issues with audio applications (CPU
usage spikes). My understanding is that this is because the CPU tells
the operating system that it has twice the number of cores that it
actually has. A hyperthreading CPU can do a limited amount of work in
parallel, but for audio where you're doing the same thing over and
over on multiple threads it can cause issues when you need to turn
around a result in a reliable and short number of milliseconds.
However, I am not a hardware engineer so it's possible that my
explanation isn't as accurate as it could be, so take it with some
grain of salt :).

It can typically be disabled as an option in the BIOS.

-Louis

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Julien Claassen <julien at mail.upb.de> wrote:
> Hi David!
>   Not, that I'm an expert, but I can't see, why HyperThreading should cause
> with RT.
>   Still, if there is a possibility to deo this from inside Linux, you'll
> have to look into the sys filessystem.
> /sys/devices/system/cpu/
>   is a likely point to start looking.
>   Asfar as I am aware, hyperthreading has been used for years and is quite
> an essential part of cpu design, I shouldn't even say "modern" in this
> context, for I heard this mentioned in one of my computer science lectures
> back in the early 2000s and that was one of the profs actually involved with
> the practical side.
>   Take this with a pinch of salt.
>   Warm regards
>       Julien
>
> ----------------------------------------
> http://juliencoder.de/nama/music.html
>
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