DragonFlyBSD Lands Another NUMA Optimization Helping AMD Threadripper 2 CPUs

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been quite impressed with AMD's Threadripper 2 processors particularly the Threadripper 2990WX with 32-cores / 64-threads. Dillon has made various optimizations to DragonFly for helping out this processor in past months and overnight he made another significant improvement.

Matthew Dillon has landed a fix for addressing some NUMA contention in DragonFlyBSD when memory is associated with CPU cores asymmetrically. This will help NUMA platforms in general but specifically the 2990WX is helped a lot since half the CPU cores have no memory directly associated with them.

In eliminating this NUMA memory contention, it's a big performance upgrade yet again for the Threadripper 2990WX. With the change he found about an 8% speed-up in the DragonFly kernel build test.

DragonFlyBSD 5.4 is shaping up to be an interesting release with a lot of improvements -- many focused on the AMD 2990WX but a lot of other enhancements in general.