Messages in this thread | | | From | Arvind Sankar <> | Date | Tue, 22 Sep 2020 18:15:23 -0400 | Subject | Re: [RFC PATCH v2] tools/x86: add kcpuid tool to show raw CPU features |
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On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 10:10:24PM +0200, Borislav Petkov wrote: > + AMD folks. > > On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 01:27:50PM +0800, Feng Tang wrote: > > End users frequently want to know what features their processor > > supports, independent of what the kernel supports. > > > > /proc/cpuinfo is great. It is omnipresent and since it is provided by > > the kernel it is always as up to date as the kernel. But, it could be > > ambiguous about processor features which can be disabled by the kernel > > at boot-time or compile-time. > > > > There are some user space tools showing more raw features, but they are > > not bound with kernel, and go with distros. Many end users are still > > using old distros with new kernels (upgraded by themselves), and may > > not upgrade the distros only to get a newer tool. > > > > So here arise the need for a new tool, which > > * Shows raw cpu features got from running cpuid > > * Be easier to obtain updates for compared to existing userspace > > tooling (perhaps distributed like perf) > > * Inherits "modern" kernel development process, in contrast to some > > of the existing userspace cpuid tools which are still being developed > > without git and distributed in tarballs from non-https sites. > > * Can produce output consistent with /proc/cpuinfo to make comparison > > easier.
Rather than a tool, would additional file(s) in, say, /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu<n> be nicer? They could show the raw CPUID features, one file per leaf or sub-leaf, maybe even along with whether they were disabled at boot-time.
> > * Be in-kernel, could leverage kernel enabling, and even > > theoretically consume arch/x86/boot/cpustr.h so it could pick up > > new features directly from one-line X86_FEATURE_* definitions.
That's arch/x86/include/asm/cpufeatures.h right -- cpustr.h is generated from that. The table there already has comments which could be extracted as the one-line description.
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