I recently picked up a used
HP Media Center m7467c PC. It has an
Intel Pentium D 940 Presler cpu. I've been investigating potential hyper-threading for the cpu, since it can be a security problem. Here's what I've found so far:
1) The Intel page linked above says it does not have hyper-threading.
2) The
WikiPedia page for Pentium D's does not suggest that the 940 has hyper-threading.
3) The BIOS does not have a feature to toggle hyper-threading.
4) I was able to conveniently boot an older version of OpenBSD. At the beginning of the dmesg it says:
Code:
OpenBSD 5.4-current (GENERIC) #58: Mon Sep 23 22:57:09 MDT 2013
todd@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
cpu0: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.20GHz ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) 3.21 GHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,\
SS,HTT,TM,PBE,NXE,LONG,SSE3,DTES64,MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,CNXT-ID,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,LAHF
Note the hi-lited
HTT, which I think means
Hyper-
Threading
Technology. Also, not sure if this is relevant, but this kernel is i386 and not "mp", while the cpu is 64-bit with 2 cores.
I'm wondering why the HTT is there? Is it wrong? Or does this feature list refer not to this specific CPU, but to Pentium D's in general, some of which do have hyper-threading?
Thanks for any insights.