CpuTopologyRebuild

An experimental Lilu plugin that optimizes Alder Lake / Raptor Lake's heterogeneous core configuration.

For example, this kext is possible to recognize the Core i9-12900K's topology as 16 cores 24 threads or 8 cores 24 threads.

Background

OpenCore's ProvideCurrentCpuInfo quirk enables Alder Lake's both P-Cores and E-Cores, but all cores and threads are recognized as equivalent. This can cause potentially single thread or real world performance degradation.

This kext aims to improve performance by rebuild the topology for these cores and threads.

The effect of this kext is not yet clear, but I've seen not only a cosmetic effect, but also some performance improvements. For example, the Geekbench 5 score on the Windows VM have increased in the case of allocating a small number of cores to VMware Fusion.
Other examples : Japanese / English(Translated)

Usage

• Use this kext with ProvideCurrentCpuInfo quirk.
• -ctrsmt boot arg makes E-Cores to be recognized as the 3-way SMT logical threads of the P-Cores. For example, it is recognized as 8 cores 24 threads in Core i9. This option seems to give the closest single thread performance to E-Cores disabled configuration.
• When HT disabled, E-Cores are recognized as a logical thread of P-Cores with or without -ctrsmt.

Topology examples

		ProvideCurrentCpuInfo	ProvideCurrentCpuInfo + CpuTopologyRebuild	ProvideCurrentCpuInfo + CpuTopologyRebuild + -ctrsmt
Core i9-13900K	8P+16E+HT	32c32t	24c32t	8c32t
Core i9-12900K	8P+8E+HT	24c24t	16c24t	8c24t
	8P+8E	16c16t	8c16t	8c16t
Core i7-12700K	8P+4E+HT	20c20t	12c20t	8c20t
	8P+4E	12c12t	8c12t	8c12t
Core i5-12600K	6P+4E+HT	16c16t	10c16t	6c16t
	6P+4E	10c10t	6c10t	6c10t

About patches.plist

patches_ht.plist

With ProvideCurrentCpuInfo, Hyper Threading is recognized as disabled due to that core and thread count are considered equal while initializing. patches_ht.plist forces the kernel to recognize that Hyper Threading is enabled.
(Performance effect is currenlty uncertain.)

patches_legacy.plist

patches_legacy.plist can be used instead of ProvideCurrentCpuInfo quirk. It is not needed normally, but ProvideCurrentCpuInfo doesn't work for High Sierra and earlier, so you can use this patch for older macOS.

Current problems

• Changing the number of cores in cpuid info causes instability such as random boot failing, so it has not been changed now.

Credits

• Apple for macOS
• vit9696 for original CpuTopologySync
• bootmacos for confirmation about Raptor Lake (i9-13900KF) and Ventura
• taruyato for confirmation 8P+4E configuration (i7-12700F) and Ventura ( #12 )
• b00t0x for writing the software and maintaining it