Re: [PATCH 4/4] selftests/resctrl: Adjust SNC support messages

[Reinette Chatre <reinette.chatre@intel.com>]

Hi Tony,

On 3/18/2024 12:34 PM, Luck, Tony wrote:
>>>> While that is in some ways a more accurate view, it breaks a lot of
>>>> legacy monitoring applications that expect the "L3" names.
>>>
>>> True - but the behaviour is different from a non SNC system, if this software can read the
>>> file - but goes wrong because the contents of the file represent something different, its
>>> still broken.
>>
>> This is a good point. There is also /sys/fs/resctrl/info/L3_MON to consider and trying to think
>> what to do about that makes me go in circles about when user space may expect resctrl to indicate
>> the resource and when user space may expect resctrl to indicate the scope. For example,
>> /sys/fs/resctrl/mon_data/mon_L3_00 contains files with data that monitor the
>> "L3" _resource_, no? If we change that to /sys/fs/resctrl/mon_data/mon_NODE_00 then it
>> switches the meaning of the middle term to be "scope" while it still contains the monitoring
>> data of the "L3" resource. So does that mean user space would need to rely on
>> /sys/fs/resctrl/info/L3_MON to obtain the information about which monitoring files
>> (/sys/fs/resctrl/info/L3_MON/mon_features) are related to the particular resource and then
>> match those filenames with the filenames in /sys/fs/resctrl/mon_data/mon_NODE_00 to know
>> which resource it applies to and learn from the directory name what scope measurement is at?
> 
> Reinette,
> 
> It's both a wave and a particle, depending on the observer.
> 
> In SNC systems resources on each socket are divided into 2, 3, 4 nodes. But the
> division is complicated. Memory and CPU cores are easy. They are each assigned
> to an SNC node. The cache is more complicated. The hash function for memory
> address to cache index is the part that is SNC aware. So memory on SNC node1
> will allocate in the cache indices assigned to SNC node1. But that function has to
> be independent of which CPU is doing the access. That's why I keep mentioning
> "well behaved NUMA applications when talking about SNC.
> 
> So the resctrl monitoring operations still work on the L3 cache, but in SNC mode
> they work on a portion of the L3 cache. As long as all accesses are NUMA local you
> can think of the cache as partitioned between the SNC nodes.
> 
> But not everything is well behaved from a NUMA perspective. It would be misleading
> to describe the occupancy and bandwidth as belonging to an SNC node.
> 
> It's also a bit misleading to describe in terms of an L3 cache instance. But doing
> so doesn't require application changes.

What is the use case for needing to expose the individual cluster counts? What if
resctrl just summed the cluster counts and presented the data as before - per L3
cache instance? I doubt that resctrl would be what applications would use to verify
whether they are "well behaved" wrt NUMA.

Reinette