Messages in this thread | | | From | Jesse Barnes <> | Subject | Re: Exporting physical topology information | Date | Thu, 18 Mar 2004 09:44:38 -0800 |
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On Wednesday 17 March 2004 1:37 pm, Martin Hicks wrote: > I'm not proposing that we build an entire physical topology tree in > sysfs, but just providing an attribute file. The two most obvious > examples of where this would be useful is for nodes and pci busses. The > Altix platform is a modular system with CPU bricks and IO bricks. We > currently have no method for locating where "node0" is, nor do we have a > method for locating pci bus 0000:20, for example.
I'm curious how other arches deal with this too. Like on ppc64 when you want to remove a CPU or set of CPUs, you have to bring it (or all of the cores on a given module) down via software, then go into the lab and find the module to pull it out. Is there a mapping somewhere that the user is expected to use? A hypervisor call of some sort to make some lights blink?
> If we could physically locate a PCI bus, then it would be much easier > to (for example) locate our defective SCSI disk that is target4 on the > SCSI controller that is on pci bus 0000:20.
This seems like one of the main uses--find components that went bad. Physically locating a CPU, DIMM, PCI board, or disk would all be easier if we provided some sort of physical identifier and logical->physical mapping information. On IRIX, we actually expose the whole physical hierarchy of the system in /hw. One of the problems with that approach is that everytime a new system configuration is released the kernel has to be updated to know about it, resulting in /hw paths that change over time, and from system to system...
Jesse
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