Hyper-Threading speeds Linux

This article gives the results of our investigation into the effects of Hyper-Threading (HT) on the Linux SMP kernel. It compares the performance of a Linux SMP kernel that was aware of Hyper-Threading to one that was not. The system under test was a multithreading-enabled, single-CPU Xeon. The benchmarks used in the study covered areas within the kernel that could be affected by Hyper-Threading, such as the scheduler, low-level kernel primitives, the file server, the network, and threaded support.