SMP(4)                 FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual                 SMP(4)

NAME
     SMP - description of the FreeBSD Symmetric Multi-Processor kernel

SYNOPSIS
     options SMP

DESCRIPTION
     The SMP kernel implements symmetric multi-processor support.

     SMP support can be disabled by setting the loader tunable
     kern.smp.disabled to 1.

     The number of CPUs detected by the system is available in the read-only
     sysctl variable hw.ncpu.

     The number of online threads per CPU core is available in the read-only
     sysctl variable kern.smp.threads_per_core.  The number of physical CPU
     cores detected by the system is available in the read-only sysctl
     variable kern.smp.cores.

     FreeBSD allows specific CPUs on a multi-processor system to be disabled.
     This can be done using the hint.lapic.X.disabled tunable, where X is the
     APIC ID of a CPU.  Setting this tunable to 1 will result in the
     corresponding CPU being disabled.

     FreeBSD supports simultaneous multithreading on x86 and powerpc
     platforms.  On x86, the logical CPUs can be disabled by setting the
     machdep.hyperthreading_allowed tunable to zero.

     The sched_ule(4) scheduler implements CPU topology detection and adjusts
     the scheduling algorithms to make better use of modern multi-core CPUs.
     The sysctl variable kern.sched.topology_spec reflects the detected CPU
     hardware in a parsable XML format.  The top level XML tag is <groups>,
     which encloses one or more <group> tags containing data about individual
     CPU groups.  A CPU group contains CPUs that are detected to be "close"
     together, usually by being cores in a single multi-core processor.
     Attributes available in a <group> tag are "level", corresponding to the
     nesting level of the CPU group and "cache-level", corresponding to the
     level of CPU caches shared by the CPUs in the group.  The <group> tag
     contains the <cpu> and <flags> tags.  The <cpu> tag describes CPUs in the
     group.  Its attributes are "count", corresponding to the number of CPUs
     in the group and "mask", corresponding to the integer binary mask in
     which each bit position set to 1 signifies a CPU belonging to the group.
     The contents (CDATA) of the <cpu> tag is the comma-delimited list of CPU
     indexes (derived from the "mask" attribute).  The <flags> tag contains
     special tags (if any) describing the relation of the CPUs in the group.
     The possible flags are currently "HTT" and "SMT", corresponding to the
     various implementations of hardware multithreading.  An example
     topology_spec output for a system consisting of two quad-core processors
     is:

     <groups>
       <group level="1" cache-level="0">
         <cpu count="8" mask="0xff">0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7</cpu>
         <flags></flags>
         <children>
           <group level="2" cache-level="0">
             <cpu count="4" mask="0xf">0, 1, 2, 3</cpu>
             <flags></flags>
           </group>
           <group level="2" cache-level="0">
             <cpu count="4" mask="0xf0">4, 5, 6, 7</cpu>
             <flags></flags>
           </group>
         </children>
       </group>
     </groups>

     This information is used internally by the kernel to schedule related
     tasks on CPUs that are closely grouped together.

COMPATIBILITY
     Support for multi-processor systems is present for all Tier-1 and Tier-2
     architectures on FreeBSD.  Currently, this includes x86, powerpc, mips,
     arm and arm64.  Support is enabled using options SMP.  It is permissible
     to use the SMP kernel configuration on non-SMP hardware.

I386 NOTES
     For i386 systems, the SMP kernel supports motherboards that follow the
     Intel MP specification, version 1.4.  In addition to options SMP, i386
     also requires device apic.  The mptable(1) command may be used to view
     the status of multi-processor support.

SEE ALSO
     cpuset(1), mptable(1), sched_4bsd(4), sched_ule(4), loader(8), sysctl(8),
     condvar(9), msleep(9), mtx_pool(9), mutex(9), rwlock(9), sema(9), sx(9)

HISTORY
     The SMP kernel's early history is not (properly) recorded.  It was
     developed in a separate CVS branch until April 26, 1997, at which point
     it was merged into 3.0-current.  By this date 3.0-current had already
     been merged with Lite2 kernel code.

     FreeBSD 5.0 introduced support for a host of new synchronization
     primitives, and a move towards fine-grained kernel locking rather than
     reliance on a Giant kernel lock.  The SMPng Project relied heavily on the
     support of BSDi, who provided reference source code from the fine-grained
     SMP implementation found in BSD/OS.

     FreeBSD 5.0 also introduced support for SMP on the sparc64 architecture.

AUTHORS
     Steve Passe <fsmp@FreeBSD.org>

CAVEATS
     The kern.smp.threads_per_core and kern.smp.cores sysctl variables are
     provided as a best-effort guess.  If an architecture or platform adds SMT
     and FreeBSD has not yet implemented detection, the reported values may be
     inaccurate.  In this case, kern.smp.threads_per_core will report 1 and
     kern.smp.cores will report the same value as hw.ncpu.

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6         January 4, 2019        FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6