Re: [PATCH] bitmap, irq: Add smp_affinity_list interface to /proc/irq

[Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com>]

Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:51:18 -0700 Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com> wrote:
> 
>>> Also, the patch adds a new interface which duplicates an existing one,
>>> only the formats are different, yes?  This is, of course, bad.
>>>
>>> The only justification we've seen for being bad is "Manually adjusting
>>> the smp_affinity for IRQ's becomes unwieldy when the cpu count is
>>> large".  A more thorough description of how painful this is might help
>>> motivate people to do bad things to the kernel.
>>>
>>> Also, if it's just a matter of an alternative presentation of the data,
>>> why not implement the desired user interface with a little userspace
>>> tool then feed the results down into the existing kernel interface?
>>>
>> Setting smp affinity to cpus 256 to 263 would be:
>>
>> echo 000000ff,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000 > smp_affinity
>>
>> instead of:
>>
>> echo 256-263 > smp_affinity_list
>>
>> Think about what it looks like for cpus around say, 4088 to 4095.
>>
>> We already have many alternate "list" interfaces:
>>
>> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/indexY/shared_cpu_list
>> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/topology/thread_siblings_list
>> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/topology/core_siblings_list
>> /sys/devices/system/node/nodeX/cpulist
>> /sys/devices/pci***/***/local_cpulist
>>
>> etc.
>>
>> This just expands on that same philosophy.
> 
> You mean that if someone had written a stupid little tool to convert a
> list of tuples into a bitmap, we wouldn't have needed to add all that
> crap to the kernel?
>