Re: [RFC PATCH] hwmon: (peci/cputemp) Number cores as seen by host system

[Guenter Roeck]

On 2/9/23 16:14, Zev Weiss wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2023 at 09:50:01AM PST, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 08, 2023 at 05:16:32PM -0800, Zev Weiss wrote:
> > > While porting OpenBMC to a new platform with a Xeon Gold 6314U CPU
> > > (Ice Lake, 32 cores), I discovered that the core numbering used by the
> > > PECI interface appears to correspond to the cores that are present in
> > > the physical silicon, rather than those that are actually enabled and
> > > usable by the host OS (i.e. it includes cores that the chip was
> > > manufactured with but later had fused off).
> > >
> > > Thus far the cputemp driver has transparently exposed that numbering
> > > to userspace in its 'tempX_label' sysfs files, making the core numbers
> > > it reported not align with the core numbering used by the host system,
> > > which seems like an unfortunate source of confusion.
> > >
> > > We can instead use a separate counter to label the cores in a
> > > contiguous fashion (0 through numcores-1) so that the core numbering
> > > reported by the PECI cputemp driver matches the numbering seen by the
> > > host.
> >
> > I don't really have an opinion if this change is desirable or not.
> > I suspect one could argue either way. I'l definitely want to see
> > feedback from others. Any comments or thoughts, anyone ?
>
> Agreed, I'd definitely like to get some input from Intel folks on this.
>
> Though since I realize my initial email didn't quite explain this explicitly, I should probably clarify with an example how weird the numbering can get with the existing code -- on the 32-core CPU I'm working with at the moment, the tempX_label files produce the following core numbers:
>
>      Core 0
>      Core 1
>      Core 2
>      Core 3
>      Core 4
>      Core 5
>      Core 6
>      Core 7
>      Core 8
>      Core 9
>      Core 11
>      Core 12
>      Core 13
>      Core 14
>      Core 15
>      Core 18
>      Core 20
>      Core 22
>      Core 23
>      Core 24
>      Core 26
>      Core 27
>      Core 28
>      Core 29
>      Core 30
>      Core 31
>      Core 33
>      Core 34
>      Core 35
>      Core 36
>      Core 38
>      Core 39
>
> i.e. it's not just a different permutation of the expected core numbers, we end up with gaps (e.g. the nonexistence of core 10), and core numbers well in excess of the number of cores the processor really "has" (e.g. number 39) -- all of which seems like a rather confusing thing to see in your BMC's sensor readings.

Sure, but what do you see with /proc/cpuinfo and with coretemp
on the host ? It might be even more confusing if the core numbers
reported by the peci driver don't match the core numbers provided
by other tools.

Guenter