linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/2] sched/topology: Allow archs to override cpu_smt

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Date:   Tue, 4 Aug 2020 12:45:20 +0200
From:   peterz@...radead.org
To:     Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc:     Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Valentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@....com>,
        Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@...aro.org>,
        Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@....com>,
        linuxppc-dev <linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>,
        Michael Neuling <mikey@...ling.org>,
        Gautham R Shenoy <ego@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Vaidyanathan Srinivasan <svaidy@...ux.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] sched/topology: Allow archs to override cpu_smt_mask

On Tue, Aug 04, 2020 at 09:03:06AM +0530, Srikar Dronamraju wrote:
> cpu_smt_mask tracks topology_sibling_cpumask. This would be good for
> most architectures. One of the users of cpu_smt_mask(), would be to
> identify idle-cores. On Power9, a pair of cores can be presented by the
> firmware as a big-core for backward compatibility reasons.
> 
> In order to maintain userspace backward compatibility with previous
> versions of processor, (since Power8 had SMT8 cores), Power9 onwards there
> is option to the firmware to advertise a pair of SMT4 cores as a fused
> cores (referred to as the big_core mode in the Linux Kernel). On Power9
> this pair shares the L2 cache as well. However, from the scheduler's point
> of view, a core should be determined by SMT4. The load-balancer already
> does this. Hence allow PowerPc architecture to override the default
> cpu_smt_mask() to point to the SMT4 cores in a big_core mode.

I'm utterly confused.

Why can't you set your regular siblings mask to the smt4 thing? Who
cares about the compat stuff, I thought that was an LPAR/AIX thing.