[PATCH 2/5] cacheinfo: Add arch hook to compress CPU h/w id into 32 bits for cache-id

[Rob Herring]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2025 at 11:38 AM James Morse <james.morse at arm.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Rob,
>
> On 23/06/2025 15:48, Rob Herring wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 8:04 AM James Morse <james.morse at arm.com> wrote:
> >> Filesystems like resctrl use the cache-id exposed via sysfs to identify
> >> groups of CPUs. The value is also used for PCIe cache steering tags. On
> >> DT platforms cache-id is not something that is described in the
> >> device-tree, but instead generated from the smallest CPU h/w id of the
> >> CPUs associated with that cache.
> >>
> >> CPU h/w ids may be larger than 32 bits.
> >>
> >> Add a hook to allow architectures to compress the value from the devicetree
> >> into 32 bits. Returning the same value is always safe as cache_of_set_id()
> >> will stop if a value larger than 32 bits is seen.
> >>
> >> For example, on arm64 the value is the MPIDR affinity register, which only
> >> has 32 bits of affinity data, but spread across the 64 bit field. An
> >> arch-specific bit swizzle gives a 32 bit value.
>
> > What's missing here is why do we need the cache id to be only 32-bits?
> > I suppose it is because the sysfs 'id' file has been implicitly that?
>
> Yup, and its too late to change.
>
>
> > Why can't we just allow 64-bit values there? Obviously, you can't have
> > a 64-bit value on x86 because that might break existing userspace.
>
> It's the same user-space. Users of resctrl should be portable between architectures.
> Resctrl isn't the only user, of the cache-id field.
>
>
> > But for Arm, there is no existing userspace to break.
>
> libvirt: https://github.com/libvirt/libvirt/blob/master/src/util/virresctrl.c#L1588

Looks to me like AMD wasn't even supported til v10.8.0 (2024-10-01)[1].

> DPDK: http://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/20241021015246.304431-2-wathsala.vithanage@arm.com/

Is that even applied yet?

> > Even with 32-bits,
> > it is entirely possible that an existing userspace assumed values less
> > than 32-bits and would be broken for Arm as-is.
>
> Sure, but I've not found a project where that is broken yet.
>
>
> > It is obviously nice
> > if we can avoid modifying userspace, but I don't think that's a
> > requirement and I'd be surprised if there's not other things that need
> > to be adapted for MPAM support.
>
> The whole multi-year effort has been to make existing user-space work without any ABI
> changes. The effect is some platforms have features that can't be used because resctrl
> expects things to be Xeon shaped.
> But if your platform looks a bit like a Xeon (cache portion controls on the L3, memory
> bandwidth controls somewhere that is believably the L3), then resctrl works as it does on
> Intel. The only thing that has come a little unstuck is the 'num_rmid' property where MPAM
> doesn't have an equivalent, so '1' is exposed as a safe value.

Fair enough, but I'd be rather surprised if there doesn't end up being
changes to support Arm platforms.

> > Also, what if an architecture can't swizzle their value into 32-bits?
> > They would be stuck with requiring userspace to deal with 64-bit
> > values.
>
> Remap them in a more complicated way. Chances are there aren't 2^32 CPUs.

What about using the logical CPU number instead? That's stable for a
given machine and firmware. And then instead of having 3 sets of
numbers (MPIDR, compressed MPIDR, and logical CPU), we'd still only
have 2. And logical CPU is what sysfs already exposes to userspace.

Rob

[1] https://libvirt.org/news.html