Questions about porting perfmon2 to powerpc
Arnd Bergmann
arnd at arndb.de
Fri Apr 6 06:08:00 EST 2007
On Thursday 05 April 2007, Kevin Corry wrote:
> First, the stock 2.6.20 kernel has a prototype in include/linux/smp.h for a
> function called smp_call_function_single(). However, this routine is only
> implemented on i386, x86_64, ia64, and mips. Perfmon2 apparently needs to
> call this to run a function on a specific CPU. Powerpc provides an
> smp_call_function() routine to run a function on all active CPUs, so I used
> that as a basis to add an smp_call_function_single() routine. I've included
> the patch below and was wondering if it looked like a sane approach.
The function itself looks good, but since it's very similar to the existing
smp_call_function(), you should probably try to share some of the code,
e.g. by making a helper function that gets an argument to decide whether
to run on a specific CPU or on all CPUs.
> Next, we ran into a problem related to Perfmon2 initialization and sysfs. The
> problem turned out to be that the powerpc version of topology_init() is
> defined as an __initcall() routine, but Perfmon2's initialization is done as
> a subsys_initcall() routine. Thus, Perfmon2 tries to initialize its sysfs
> information before some of the powerpc cpu information has been initialized.
> However, on all other architectures, topology_init() is defined as a
> subsys_initcall() routine, so this problem was not seen on any other
> platforms. Changing the powerpc version of topology_init() to a
> subsys_initcall() seems to have fixed the bug. However, I'm not sure if that
> is going to cause problems elsewhere in the powerpc code. I've included the
> patch below (after the smp-call-function-single patch). Does anyone know if
> this change is safe, or if there was a specific reason that topology_init()
> was left as an __initcall() on powerpc?
In general, it's better to do initcalls as late as possible, so __initcall()
is preferred over subsys_initcall() if both work. Have you tried doing it
the other way and starting perfmon2 from a regular __initcall()?
Arnd <><
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