matically switch to SMT2 for that core (independent of other cores). The opposite is not true, so if threads 0 & 1 are idle and 2 & 3 are active, we will stay in SMT4 mode. Similarly if thread 0 is active and threads 1, 2 & 3 are idle, we'll go into SMT1 mode. If we can get the core into a lower SMT mode (SMT1 is best), the threads will perform better (since they share less core resources). Hence when we have idle threads, we want them to be the higher ones. This adds a feature bit for asymmetric packing to powerpc and then enables it on POWER7. Signed-off-by: Michael Neuling Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra Acked-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: Paul Mackerras Cc: linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org LKML-Reference: <20100608045702.31FB5CC8C7@localhost.localdomain> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar