Core Parking in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7
Core Parking is a new Windows kernel power manager and kernel scheduler technology designed to help improving the energy efficiency of multicore systems. It constantly tracks the relative workloads of every hardware thread relative to all the others and can decide to put some of them into sleep mode.
Core Parking allows improving the multicore energy efficiency by dynamically scaling the number of hardware threads that are in use based on workload. When the workload for one of the hardware threads is lower than a certain threshold value, the Core Parking algorithm will try to reduce the number of hardware threads that are in use by parking some of the hardware threads in the system. Hardware threads are also known as logical cores or logical processors. Figure 1 shows Windows Resource Monitor displaying the activity of eight hardware threads, with four of them parked.
To make this algorithm efficient, the kernel scheduler gives preference to unparked hardware threads when it schedules non-affinitized software threads. The kernel scheduler will try to let the parked hardware threads become idle and this will allow them to transition into a lower power idle state. This means that if you create software that tries to achieve thread-affinity, it will interfere with this complex algorithm. However, when you create software that tries to maximize performance, you try to take advantage of all the available hardware threads, and therefore you usually don't want parked cores.
Under certain workloads, a system with 16 hardware threads can turn itself into a system with two hardware threads when it is under a light workload and suddenly increase and then spin up reserve hardware threads as needed.
Figure 2 shows Windows Resource Monitor displaying eight hardware threads under heavy workload, with none of them parked. The parked hardware threads transitioned into a high power state because of the additional workload.
Besides, Core Parking tries to schedule work between threads that are running on multiple hardware threads in the same physical core on systems with microprocessors that include Intel Hyper-Threading Technology. This scheduling decision usually improves performance on multi-threaded code running on this kind of microprocessors.
Windows Server 2008 R2 supports the complete Core Parking technology. However, Windows 7 also uses the Core Parking algorithm and infrastructure to balance processor performance between hardware threads with microprocessors that include Intel Hyper-Threading Technology.
No matter the number of parked hardware threads, if you have software that retrieves the number of hardware threads of logical cores, the number returned will be the total number and not just the unparked ones. Therefore, when you have algorithms that try to take advantage of the total number of hardware threads available, the Core Parking technology isn't going to limit the number of hardware threads assigned because some of them are parked.
Some software isn't prepared to deal with the additional latency introduced by Core Parking because it assumes that all the hardware threads are going to be in the same power state all the time. In these cases, the additional latency can introduce performance problems, especially if the software tries to offer a real-time response to the user. For example, some software that doesn't require a stable workload could fire the Core Parking algorithms many times in a few seconds and the latency introduced could generate an impact in its real-time response to the user. As you may guess, some games that aren't optimized to take full advantage of all the available hardware threads could face a problem known as micro-stuttering. Gamers call micro-stuttering the problem of not succeeding in displaying regular distributed frames due to unexpected large time intervals between individual images, i.e., a high FPS (short for Frames Per Second) followed by a low FPS.
If you want to learn about some of the enhancements in the Windows 7 kernel, you can watch this video in which Windows kernel guru Mark Russinovich talks about many of the new improvements.
