Re: [RFC v2 0/5] surface heterogeneous memory performance information

Dave Hansen
2017-07-07T16:20:01Z

On 07/06/2017 11:27 PM, Balbir Singh wrote:
> On Thu, 2017-07-06 at 15:52 -0600, Ross Zwisler wrote:
>> # grep . mem_tgt2/* mem_tgt2/local_init/* 2>/dev/null
>> mem_tgt2/firmware_id:1

This is here for folks that know their platform and know exactly the
firmware ID (PXM in ACPI parlance) of a given piece of memory. Without
this, we might be stuck with requiring the NUMA node ID that the kernel
uses to be bound 1:1 with the firmware ID.

>> mem_tgt2/is_cached:0

This tells whether the memory is cached by some other memory. MCDRAM is
an example of this. It can be used as a high-bandwidth cache in front
of the lower-bandwidth DRAM.

This is referred to as "Memory Side Cache Information Structure" in the
ACPI spec: www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/ACPI_6_2.pdf

>> mem_tgt2/is_enabled:1
>> mem_tgt2/is_isolated:0

This one is described in detail in the ACPI spec. It's called
"Reservation hint" in there.

>> mem_tgt2/phys_addr_base:0x0
>> mem_tgt2/phys_length_bytes:0x800000000
>> mem_tgt2/local_init/read_bw_MBps:30720
>> mem_tgt2/local_init/read_lat_nsec:100
>> mem_tgt2/local_init/write_bw_MBps:30720
>> mem_tgt2/local_init/write_lat_nsec:100
>
> How to these numbers compare to normal system memory?

They're made up in this instance. But, it's safe to expect 10x swings
in bandwidth in latency, both up and down.