[RFC PATCHv2 1/2] Export SoC info through sysfs

[lee.jones@linaro.org (Lee Jones)]

On 08/04/11 16:02, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Friday 08 April 2011, Lee Jones wrote:
>> On 08/04/11 04:35, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>> On Friday 08 April 2011, Greg KH wrote:
>>>> Symlinks are a requirement as multiple cpus can be attached to a single
>>>> SoC.
>>>>
>>>> What about multiple cpus that are attached to multiple SoCs?  Why even
>>>> try to describe this relationship, what would userspace get out of this
>>>> information?
>>>
>>> The only one I can think of is node affinity. I've worked with a system
>>> (IBM QS2x Cell blade) that had two SoCs with multiple CPUs each. There was
>>> a significant performance penalty when talking to devices on the remote
>>> SoC. In that case, we used the NUMA node information in sys to deal
>>> with it, but we might not want to use the NUMA infrastructure on systems
>>> that only have RAM on one node.
>>
>> I'm struggling to see a scenario where we'd have multiple SoCs on a
>> single device and only one filesystem. ux500 sub-arch code is yet to
>> facilitate SoC counting functionality. If were are to implement per-SoC
>> directories would this need to be added?
> 
> How can you say we won't need it when I've just given you a specific
> example of a widely shipping machine?

I didn't say we won't need it. I'm just finding it difficult to picture
how it would work. I'm more than happy to implement it, but there are
more things to take into consideration, such as naming conventions for
multiple SoCs. Even if they start at '1' and increase sequentially,
there are still questions that need to be answered, such as; How will
the SoCs be ordered? First come first served? Priority order? Or we
could name them by soc_id?

> It's not important that the kernel internal code supports multiple SoCs as
> long as there is no in-tree user for this. It can always be added at a later
> point.
> 
> What is important is that the user interface accomodates for it. If you
> name the device simply /sys/devices/soc/, any user program looking at
> that will have to be modified when we have more than one. We cannot
> allow that to happen.

No problem. I can insure it's complete on first submission.