Clear Linux Will Now Handle Up To 512 CPU Cores / vCPUs

Following yesterday's article looking at the performance of Intel's Clear Linux running on AMD EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" with great performance results even though Clear's kernel was limited to 320 of the 384 available logical CPU cores for the EPYC 9654 2P setup, the kernel has now been adjusted to handle up to 512 CPUs.

The Clear Linux kernel had been set to 320 for its NR_CPUS tunable as a value deemed enough years ago but is no longer the case when with AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs there can now be up to 96 cores / 192 threads per socket, or 384 threads / logical cores in total for a two socket system.

That oversight has now been fixed with the Clear Linux kernel setting the value to 512 that should be enough for now but still below the top-end lofty limit of of 8192 NR_CPUS set by some Linux distribution vendor kernel builds.

The revised CPU limit for Clear Linux will be trickling down to an updated kernel and I'll be repeating the benchmarks on the EPYC 9654 2P for looking at more workloads now in really pushing these top-end Genoa CPUs full-throttle.