Re: [PATCH] revert "PCI: log vendor/device ID always"

[Bjorn Helgaas]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 8:54 AM, Nathan Zimmer <nzimmer@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 10/05/2012 09:14 AM, Joe Perches wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 2012-10-05 at 08:55 -0500, Nathan Zimmer wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10/04/2012 11:37 AM, Joe Perches wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, 2012-10-04 at 11:02 -0500, Nathan Zimmer wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> At many of our customer sites the log level is set to KERN_DEBUG. It
>>>>> helps avoid reboots due to operator impatience.  Machines this large
>>>>> take significantly longer then typical to boot and seeing the extra
>>>>> messages reassures them that the kernel isn't hung.
>>>>
>>>> That argues for adding some KERN_INFO "still booting" messages
>>>> not logging unnecessary KERN_DEBUG messages.
>>>>
>>> Actually I would think that argues for reducing boot times on these
>>> large systems.
>>
>> Right.
>>
>> That's an independent argument, but sure, go ahead
>> and do that too.
>>
>
>
> Here is output for my workstation a simple 4x box
>
> -bash-4.1$ dmesg | grep "type [0-9][0-9] class" | wc
>      12     108     804
> -bash-4.1$ dmesg | wc
>     744    6359   49474
>
>
> Here is some output from one of the biggest boxes.
>
> -bash-4.1$ dmesg | wc
>   26503  235414 1811651
> -bash-4.1$ dmesg | grep "type [0-9][0-9] class" | wc
>   12085 108765  821780

Many vendors don't expose host bridges that lead to the CPU-related
PCI devices because they don't want the OS to muck with them.  We
currently blindly probe for these in domain 0, so we find them anyway
(I think we should change this behavior).

I'd guess that having all these CPU-related devices around also really
clutters up "lspci" output, and of course, consumes memory for all the
pci_dev structs in the kernel.  It takes some time to enumerate them
all, so avoiding that would speed up boot somewhat.

So I wonder if it might be more useful to figure out how to avoid
enumerating those devices in the first place?  The first step would be
to stop exposing PNP0A03/PNP0A08 host bridges that lead to them.  As I
mentioned, we currently will probably find them anyway via blind
probing.  You might be able to avoid that if you could place them in a
PCI domain other than 0.

Bjorn
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