Linux Systems Engineering ⏱️ 9 min read 📅 October 31, 2026

CoreMiner Linux & WSL2 Advanced Tuning Guide: HugePages 1GB, CPU Thread Pinning & AVX-512 Maximization

Running CoreMiner on default Linux or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) settings leaves up to 24% of your CPU’s hashing throughput on the table. This practical guide walks through kernel memory allocation, 1GB HugePages setup, thread pinning via taskset, and NUMA node alignment.

        🚀 Performance Gains at a Glance
        Default Ubuntu / WSL2: 1,902 H/s (4KB standard memory pages, frequent TLB cache misses).
With 2MB HugePages Enabled: 2,180 H/s (+14.6% boost, reduced TLB miss penalties).
With 1GB HugePages + Thread Affinity Binding: 2,358 H/s (+23.9% boost) with rock-solid latency.

      

1. The Root Cause of TLB Bottlenecks in Catch-22 PoDE

Catch-22 generates a massive scratchpad buffer in system memory for each active worker thread. When the CPU accesses this scratchpad with default 4KB virtual memory pages, the processor’s Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) is repeatedly exhausted.

By enabling HugePages (2MB or 1GB), the CPU can map several gigabytes of memory with only a handful of TLB entries, virtually eliminating memory translation stalls.

2. Configuring HugePages on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Step 1: Check Current HugePages Support

        $ cat /proc/meminfo | grep -i huge

        AnonHugePages:         0 kB

        HugePages_Total:       0

        HugePages_Free:        0

        Hugepagesize:       2048 kB

Step 2: Allocate 2MB HugePages Dynamically

For a 16-core / 32-thread CPU (e.g. Ryzen 9 7950X), allocate 3,072 HugePages (approx. 6GB of RAM):

        sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=3072

        sudo sysctl -w vm.hugetlb_shm_group=0

Step 3: Make HugePages Persistent

Add the following lines to /etc/sysctl.conf:

        vm.nr_hugepages = 3072

        vm.hugetlb_shm_group = 0

3. CPU Affinity Binding via Taskset

On dual-CCD processors (like AMD Ryzen 7900X/7950X or dual-socket Xeon/EPYC), threads that migrate between CCDs incur a heavy cross-infinity fabric latency penalty (approx. 70ns vs 18ns intra-CCD).

Use taskset to bind each miner instance directly to physical cores on CCD0 or CCD1:

        # Bind worker instance 1 to Cores 0-7 (CCD0):

        taskset -c 0-7,16-23 ./coreminer -P cb://...

        # Bind worker instance 2 to Cores 8-15 (CCD1):

        taskset -c 8-15,24-31 ./coreminer -P cb://...

4. WSL2 Specific Tuning (Windows 11)

Create or edit your C:\Users\<YourUsername>\.wslconfig file with the following parameters:

        [wsl2]

        memory=24GB

        processors=32

        pageReporting=false

        kernelCommandLine=hugepages=3072

Restart WSL2 with wsl --shutdown in PowerShell to apply changes.