CMOS occasionally resets hyperthreading. Can I force hyperthreading on using Linux kernel?

I have some i7-4700EQ based embedded server systems that require hyperthreading. All is good except that, on rare occasions, the hyperthreading flag in CMOS gets set to disabled. While the hardware is still in my possession, I can simply reboot, go into CMOS and fix the setting. (All other settings in CMOS stay good including the time/date so I'm thinking it isn't the battery.) However, once deployed, there is no console access. If the CMOS setting is lost, the equipment could be "repaired" but that seems like a great deal of work for a very simple problem. My understanding is that the Linux kernel reads the BIOS only to initialize kernel variables. Is that correct? If that is correct, is there a way to tell the Linux kernel to ignore what the BIOS reports and simply enable hyperthreading in the kernel? If possible, is there an easy way (eg grub command line setting) to do this? Else if possible but difficult, can ignoring what the BIOS says and enabling hyperthreading be accomplished by modifying kernel source and recompiling? While I didn't think it would work, I already tried in /etc/default/grub GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash maxcpus=8 nr_cpus=8" followed with using update-grub and rebooting. (I also tried setting maxcpus and nr_cpus individually.) I have found numerous examples of disabling hyperthreading on a running system and then re-enabling it. But not examples of enabling if the kernel incorrectly thinks a human intentionally disabled hyperthreading. Finally, I could claim "broken hardware" but that isn't going to win any "wars" on its own. If it is not possible to force hyperthreading to be enabled despite the BIOS, that is a valid answer - and the answer will be useful to me if it includes evidence / explanations why.