Finding out processor topology

The other day Varun and I were discussing about how we could find out the system multi-threaded/multi-core topology. We looked at /proc/cpuinfo and got our answer. So the following fields in the cpuinfo file would need to be consulted to understand the topology of the system:

physical id: physical package id of the CPU

siblings: number of processors, present in the same physical package. This counts both hardware threads and cores

core id: Core id of the processor

cpu cores: number of cores in the physical package

Also, the flags field contains a flag called "ht", to indicate if hardware multi-threading is supported by the processor

So, if for a physical package, the number of siblings is equal to the number of cores and both are greater than 2, it would mean that it has multiple cores and does not support hardware threads. If the number of siblings is greater than 2 but the number of cores is one, then that would imply that there is only a single core in one package and that there is support for hardware threads. Some systems could have processors that are both, multi-threaded and ulti-core. For these, the number of siblings and the number of cores in a physical package would be more than one.

The topology information can be very useful. It can be used to bind certain application or kernel threads, and/or irqs to particular cpus, to improve throughput by reducing resource contention and aid the scheduler in making better load balancing decisions.