System/uncore PMUs and unit aggregation

[Jan Glauber]

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
> 
> 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.

Good to know. Thanks for adressing this on a higher level.

> 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.

Can you elaborate why they should be treated independent in the later
case? What is the problem with going through a list and writing the
control register per unit?

>   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.

Do you mean started/stopped atomically across units?

>   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.

On Cavium ThunderX the current patches add 4 PMU types, which unfortunately
are all handled different. The L2C-TAD and OCX-TLK have control
registers per unit. The LMC and L2C-CBC don't have control registers,
(free-running counters). So rule 1 might be too restrictive.

I've not looked into groups, would these allow to merge counters from
different PMUs in the kernel?

--Jan

> If the driver authors (on To:) could shed some light on this, then that
> would be much appreciated!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Will