Re: [PATCH 2/2] x86: modify show_shared_cpu_map in intel_cacheinfo

From: Bert Wesarg
Date: Mon Mar 31 2008 - 13:24:51 EST


On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Mike Travis <travis@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Bert Wesarg wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 7:19 PM, Mike Travis <travis@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> > Aren't the most cpumaps (like cpu/cpu*/topology/*_siblings or
> >> > node/node*/cpumap) bitmasks?
> >>
> >> I did an informal survey and you are right, the majority of references do use
> >> cpumask_scnprintf instead of cpulist_scnprintf. Maybe the later function was
> >> added later?
> >>
> >> To me though, it would seem that:
> >>
> >> 240-255
> >>
> >> is more readable than:
> >>
> >> 00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,0000ffff
> >>
> >> And as I mentioned, bitmask_parselist() [libbitmask(3)] does parse the output.
> > But libbitmask has a bitmask_parsehex() too. (but thanks for the
> > pointer to this code).
> >
> > Anyway, your above example is wrong, the most significant bits comes first:
> >
> > ffff0000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000
> >
> > This makes it not more readable, but I think readability isn't in this
> > case of that much importance.
>
> The original problem was how to avoid allocating a large stack space to display
> cpu ids. By using cpulist_scnprintf, it accomplishes this without, what I think
> is too much pain. If it's really that much of a problem, I will rework this patch.
> But the length of the line with 4096 cpus will be 1152 bytes Is this really
> better?
I ask myself, why is there a temporary buffer allocation in the first
place? In the end it is copied unbounded into the provided buf
argument. Sure your list is mostly shorter than a hex mask, but you
can also not be sure that it fit into the provided buffer. So you can
also use cpumask_scnprintf directly with the buf argument, and provide
a good known upper bound for the size (ie.
cpumask_scnprintf_len(nr_cpu_ids)).

>
>
> >
> > I further think, this problem could be easily solved, if NR_CPUS and
> > possibly your nr_cpus_ids is somehow exported to user space.
> >
> > With this information, the user is not surprised to see more that 1024
> > bits (=CPU_SETSIZE, which is currently the glibc constant for the
> > sched_{set,get}affinity() API). Also the glibc has the new variable
> > cpu_set_t size API (since 2.7).
>
> Yes, thanks. That is being dealt with in another task.
Can you keep me up to date. Thanks.

Bert
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
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