Hi,

I'm trying to figure out what the best way is to export a minimal amount
of physical topology information to userland.  Would it be acceptable to
export this kind of information with sysfs?

I'm not proposing that we build an entire physical topology tree in
sysfs, but just providing an attribute file.  The two most obvious
examples of where this would be useful is for nodes and pci busses.  The
Altix platform is a modular system with CPU bricks and IO bricks.  We
currently have no method for locating where "node0" is, nor do we have a
method for locating pci bus 0000:20, for example.

If we could physically locate a PCI bus, then it would be much easier
to (for example) locate our defective SCSI disk that is target4 on the
SCSI controller that is on pci bus 0000:20.

The attached patch, care of Jesse Barnes, exports a physid attribute for
each node, which indicates the physical location of the node.  Altix
specific.

thanks
mh

-- 
Martin Hicks                Wild Open Source Inc.
mort@wildopensource.com     613-266-2296