Re: [PATCH v9 0/3] powerpc: Detection and scheduler optimization for POWER9 bigcore

[Gautham R Shenoy <ego@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

Hello Dave,

On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 07:05:11AM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On 10/01/2018 06:16 AM, Gautham R. Shenoy wrote:
> > 
> > Patch 3: Creates a pair of sysfs attributes named
> > 	  /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/topology/smallcore_thread_siblings
> > 	  and
> > 	  /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/topology/smallcore_thread_siblings_list
> > 	  exposing the small-core siblings that share the L1 cache
> > 	  to the userspace.
> 
> I really don't think you've justified the existence of a new user/kernel
> interface here.  We already have information about threads share L1
> caches in here:
> 
> 	/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index0/shared_cpu_list


Hmmm. My bad, I wasn't aware of this sysfs interface. We can use this
to share information about L1 cache. And currently on the upstream
kernel we report incorrect value on POWER9 SMT8 core. I will fix
this. Thanks for calling this out.

> 
> The only question would be if anything would break because it assumes
> that all SMT siblings share all caches.  But, it breaks if your new
> interface is there or not; it's old software that we care about.
>

Up until POWER9 SMT8 cores, this assumption was true that all SMT
siblings share all caches. POWER9 SMT8 cores are the only exception. 

--
Thanks and Regards
gautham.