System/uncore PMUs and unit aggregation

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 06:17:08PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We currently have support for three arm64 system PMUs in flight:
> 
>  [Cavium ThunderX] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/cover.1477741719.git.jglauber@cavium.com
>  [Hisilicon Hip0x] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1478151727-20250-1-git-send-email-anurup.m@huawei.com
>  [Qualcomm L2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1477687813-11412-1-git-send-email-nleeder@codeaurora.org
> 
> Each of which have to deal with multiple underlying hardware units in one
> way or another. Mark and I recently expressed a desire to expose these
> units to userspace as individual PMU instances, since this can allow:
> 
>   * Fine-grained control of events from userspace, when you want to see
>     individual numbers as opposed to a summed total
> 
>   * Potentially ease migration to new SoC revisions, where the units
>     are laid out slightly differently
> 
>   * Easier handling of cases where the units aren't quite identical

This is I think similar to the Intel Uncore situation. We expose every
single individual PMU independently. The Intel uncore is wide and varied
between parts.

Leaving the rest for Kan, who's doing the Intel uncore bits.

 ~ Peter

> however, this received pushback from all of the patch authors, so there's
> clearly a problem with this approach. I'm hoping we can try to resolve
> this here.
> 
> Speaking to Mark earlier today, we came up with the following rough rules
> for drivers that present multiple hardware units as a single PMU:
> 
>   1. If the units share some part of the programming interface (e.g. control
>      registers or interrupts), then they must be handled by the same PMU.
>      Otherwise, they should be treated independently as separate PMU
>      instances.
> 
>   2. If the units are handled by the same PMU, then care must be taken to
>      handle event groups correctly. That is, if the units cannot be started
>      and stopped atomically, cross-unit groups must be rejected by the
>      driver. Furthermore, any cross-unit scheduling constraints must be
>      honoured so that all the units targetted by a group can schedule the
>      group concurrently.
> 
>   3. Summing the counters across units is only permitted if the units
>      can all be started and stopped atomically. Otherwise, the counters
>      should be exposed individually. It's up to the driver author to
>      decide what makes sense to sum.
> 
>   4. Unit topology can optionally be described in sysfs (we should pick
>      some standard directory naming here), and then events targetting
>      specific units can have the unit identifier extracted from the topology
>      encoded in some configN fields.
> 
> The million dollar question is: how does that fit in with the drivers I
> mentioned at the top? Is this overly restrictive, or have we missed stuff?
> 
> We certainly want to allow flexibility in the way in which the drivers
> talk to the hardware, but given that these decisions directly affect the
> user ABI, some consistent ground rules are required.
> 
> For Cavium ThunderX, it's not clear whether or not the individual units
> could be expressed as separate PMUs, or whether they're caught by one of
> the rules above. The Qualcomm L2 looks like it's doing the right thing
> and we can't quite work out what the Hisilicon Hip0x topology looks like,
> since the interaction with djtag is confusing.
> 
> If the driver authors (on To:) could shed some light on this, then that
> would be much appreciated!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Will