linux/Documentation/powerpc/associativity.rst
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   2NUMA resource associativity
   3============================
   4
   5Associativity represents the groupings of the various platform resources into
   6domains of substantially similar mean performance relative to resources outside
   7of that domain. Resources subsets of a given domain that exhibit better
   8performance relative to each other than relative to other resources subsets
   9are represented as being members of a sub-grouping domain. This performance
  10characteristic is presented in terms of NUMA node distance within the Linux kernel.
  11From the platform view, these groups are also referred to as domains.
  12
  13PAPR interface currently supports different ways of communicating these resource
  14grouping details to the OS. These are referred to as Form 0, Form 1 and Form2
  15associativity grouping. Form 0 is the oldest format and is now considered deprecated.
  16
  17Hypervisor indicates the type/form of associativity used via "ibm,architecture-vec-5 property".
  18Bit 0 of byte 5 in the "ibm,architecture-vec-5" property indicates usage of Form 0 or Form 1.
  19A value of 1 indicates the usage of Form 1 associativity. For Form 2 associativity
  20bit 2 of byte 5 in the "ibm,architecture-vec-5" property is used.
  21
  22Form 0
  23------
  24Form 0 associativity supports only two NUMA distances (LOCAL and REMOTE).
  25
  26Form 1
  27------
  28With Form 1 a combination of ibm,associativity-reference-points, and ibm,associativity
  29device tree properties are used to determine the NUMA distance between resource groups/domains.
  30
  31The “ibm,associativity” property contains a list of one or more numbers (domainID)
  32representing the resource’s platform grouping domains.
  33
  34The “ibm,associativity-reference-points” property contains a list of one or more numbers
  35(domainID index) that represents the 1 based ordinal in the associativity lists.
  36The list of domainID indexes represents an increasing hierarchy of resource grouping.
  37
  38ex:
  39{ primary domainID index, secondary domainID index, tertiary domainID index.. }
  40
  41Linux kernel uses the domainID at the primary domainID index as the NUMA node id.
  42Linux kernel computes NUMA distance between two domains by recursively comparing
  43if they belong to the same higher-level domains. For mismatch at every higher
  44level of the resource group, the kernel doubles the NUMA distance between the
  45comparing domains.
  46
  47Form 2
  48-------
  49Form 2 associativity format adds separate device tree properties representing NUMA node distance
  50thereby making the node distance computation flexible. Form 2 also allows flexible primary
  51domain numbering. With numa distance computation now detached from the index value in
  52"ibm,associativity-reference-points" property, Form 2 allows a large number of primary domain
  53ids at the same domainID index representing resource groups of different performance/latency
  54characteristics.
  55
  56Hypervisor indicates the usage of FORM2 associativity using bit 2 of byte 5 in the
  57"ibm,architecture-vec-5" property.
  58
  59"ibm,numa-lookup-index-table" property contains a list of one or more numbers representing
  60the domainIDs present in the system. The offset of the domainID in this property is
  61used as an index while computing numa distance information via "ibm,numa-distance-table".
  62
  63prop-encoded-array: The number N of the domainIDs encoded as with encode-int, followed by
  64N domainID encoded as with encode-int
  65
  66For ex:
  67"ibm,numa-lookup-index-table" =  {4, 0, 8, 250, 252}. The offset of domainID 8 (2) is used when
  68computing the distance of domain 8 from other domains present in the system. For the rest of
  69this document, this offset will be referred to as domain distance offset.
  70
  71"ibm,numa-distance-table" property contains a list of one or more numbers representing the NUMA
  72distance between resource groups/domains present in the system.
  73
  74prop-encoded-array: The number N of the distance values encoded as with encode-int, followed by
  75N distance values encoded as with encode-bytes. The max distance value we could encode is 255.
  76The number N must be equal to the square of m where m is the number of domainIDs in the
  77numa-lookup-index-table.
  78
  79For ex:
  80ibm,numa-lookup-index-table = <3 0 8 40>;
  81ibm,numa-distace-table = <9>, /bits/ 8 < 10  20  80 20  10 160 80 160  10>;
  82
  83::
  84
  85          | 0    8   40
  86        --|------------
  87          |
  88        0 | 10   20  80
  89          |
  90        8 | 20   10  160
  91          |
  92        40| 80   160  10
  93
  94A possible "ibm,associativity" property for resources in node 0, 8 and 40
  95
  96{ 3, 6, 7, 0 }
  97{ 3, 6, 9, 8 }
  98{ 3, 6, 7, 40}
  99
 100With "ibm,associativity-reference-points"  { 0x3 }
 101
 102"ibm,lookup-index-table" helps in having a compact representation of distance matrix.
 103Since domainID can be sparse, the matrix of distances can also be effectively sparse.
 104With "ibm,lookup-index-table" we can achieve a compact representation of
 105distance information.
 106