Re: [PATCH 0/7] ACPI HMAT memory sysfs representation

[Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>]

On 11/26/18 7:38 AM, Anshuman Khandual wrote:
> On 11/24/2018 12:51 AM, Dave Hansen wrote:
>> On 11/22/18 10:42 PM, Anshuman Khandual wrote:
>>> Are we willing to go in the direction for inclusion of a new system
>>> call, subset of it appears on sysfs etc ? My primary concern is not
>>> how the attribute information appears on the sysfs but lack of it's
>>> completeness.
>>
>> A new system call makes total sense to me.  I have the same concern
>> about the completeness of what's exposed in sysfs, I just don't see a
>> _route_ to completeness with sysfs itself.  Thus, the minimalist
>> approach as a first step.
> 
> Okay if we agree on the need for a new specific system call extracting
> the superset attribute information MAX_NUMNODES * MAX_NUMNODES * U64
> (u64 packs 8 bit values for 8 attributes or something like that) as we
> had discussed before, it makes sense to export a subset of it which can
> be faster but useful for the user space without going through a system
> call. 

The information that needs to be exported is a bit more than that.  It's
not just a binary attribute.

The information we have from the new ACPI table, for instance, is the
read and write bandwidth and latency between two nodes.  They are, IIRC,
two-byte values in the ACPI table[1], each.  That's 8 bytes worth of
data right there, which wouldn't fit *anything* else.

The list of things we want to export will certainly grow.  That means we
need a syscall something like this:

int get_mem_attribute(unsigned long attribute_nr,
		      unsigned long __user * initiator_nmask,
		      unsigned long __user * target_nmask,
		      unsigned long maxnode,
		      unsigned long *attributes_out);

#define MEM_ATTR_READ_BANDWIDTH		1
#define MEM_ATTR_WRITE_BANDWIDTH	2
#define MEM_ATTR_READ_LATENCY		3
#define MEM_ATTR_WRITE_LATENCTY		4
#define MEM_ATTR_ENCRYPTION		5

If you want to know the read latency between nodes 4 and 8, you do:

	ret = get_mem_attr(MEM_ATTR_READ_LATENCY,
			   (1<<4), (1<<8), max, &array);

And the answer shows up at array[0] in this example.  If you had more
than one bit set in the two nmasks, you would have a longer array.

The length of the array is the number of bits set in initiator_nmask *
the number of bits set in target_nmask * sizeof(ulong).

This has the advantage of supporting ULONG_MAX attributes, and scales
from asking for one attribute at a time all the way up to dumping the
entire system worth of data for a single attribute.  The only downside
is that it's one syscall per attribute instead of packing them all
together.  But, if we have a small enough number to pack them in one
ulong, then I think we can make 64 syscalls without too much trouble.

> Do you agree on a (system call + sysfs) approach in principle ?
> Also sysfs exported information has to be derived from whats available
> through the system call not the other way round. Hence the starting
> point has to be the system call definition.

Both the sysfs information *and* what will be exported in any future
interfaces are derived from platform-specific information.  They are not
derived from one _interface_ or the other.

They obviously need to be consistent, though.

1. See "Table 5-142 System Locality Latency and Bandwidth Information
Structure" here:
http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/ACPI_6_2.pdf