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SubjectRe: [RFC PATCH v2 00/16] ACPI based system device hotplug framework
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On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 23:44 +0800, Jiang Liu wrote:
> On 08/08/2012 07:38 AM, Toshi Kani wrote:
> > On Sat, 2012-08-04 at 20:13 +0800, Jiang Liu wrote:
> >> From: Jiang Liu <liuj97@gmail.com>
> >>
> >> The patchset is based on v3.5-rc6 and you may pull them from:
> >> git://github.com/jiangliu/linux.git acpihp
> >>
> >> Modern high-end server may support advanced hotplug features for system
> >> devices, including physical processor, memory board, IO extension board
> >> and/or computer node. The ACPI specifications have provided standard
> >> interfaces between firmware and OS to support device hotplug at runtime.
> >> This patch series provide an ACPI based hotplug framework to support system
> >> device hotplug at runtime, which will replace current existing ACPI device
> >> driver based CPU/memory/CONTAINER hotplug mechanism.
> >>
> >> The new ACPI based hotplug framework is modelled after PCI hotplug
> >> architecture and target to achieve following goals:
> >
> > Hi Jiang,
> >
> > It is nice to see such infrastructure work! I have some high-level
> > questions / comments below. So far, I have only looked at part of the
> > changes briefly, so please correct me if I missed something.
>
> Hi Toshi,
> Thanks for your time to review these patches!
>
> >
> >> 1) Provide a mechanism to detect hotplug slots by checking ACPI _EJ0 method,
> >> ACPI PRCT (platform RAS capabilities table) and other platform specific
> >> mechanisms.
> >
> > Does this mean that hot-plug device must support both hot-add &
> > hot-delete operations? Some platforms may choose to only support
> > hot-add operations to increase the resource on-line (since it requires
> > less effort and Windows does not support hot-remove, either).
> This is a good question. By default, the framework detects hotplug slot
> by checking _EJ0 method. If a system does support hot-add only components,
> some static ACPI tables, like PRCT, may be used to describe hotplug slots
> available in the system.
>
> Basically ACPI PRCT table contains tuples of (device type, uid, RAS capabilities).

I am not familiar with the PRCT table. Can you point me to the spec? I
did not find it in the ACPI spec.

> >> 2) Unify the way to enumerate ACPI based hotplug slots. All hotplug slots
> >> will be enumerated by the enumeration driver, instead of by ACPI device
> >> drivers.
> >
> > It is nice to see redundant ACPI namespace walks removed from the ACPI
> > drivers. But why do you need to add a new enumerator to create the
> > acpihp_slot tree, in addition to the current acpi_device tree? I'd
> > prefer hotplug features to be generally integrated into the current ACPI
> > core code and data structures, instead of adding a new layer on top of
> > it.
> The idea comes from PCI hotplug framework, which has an concepts of PCI
> hotplug slot and PCI device. For system device hotplug, we could follow
> the same model as PCI by abstracting control points as slots. By introducing
> of hotplug slot, we could:

Yes, I understand that. Using the slot concept on PCI hotplug makes
sense as it has PCI slot objects in ACPI. For non-PCI, however, you are
kind of faking slots and introducing a new slot tree on top of the
existing ACPI device tree, so I am not sure if it is a good idea...

> 1) Report all hotplug slots and slot's capabilities to user, no matter whether
> there are devices connecting to a slot. If we integrate hotplug functionality
> into current ACPI device tree, the slot (or device) is only visible when the
> connected devices are enabled.

We need to think about both physical and virtual machines. Devices can
be virtualized and there can be many of them. For example, let's say,
1TB of physical memory is logically sliced up with 1024 * 1GB memory
objects for guests, so that they can add / delete memory by 1GB. If a
guest has only 2GB of memory assigned, it has other 1022 devices
disabled. In this case, showing 1022 empty memory slots may not be very
helpful for users.

> 2) Provide interfaces for software to control hotplug slots. With current ACPI
> definition, we could only trigger ACPI hotplug events by pressing hotplug button
> or through some OOB device management system. To support RAS features like
> memory power management, memory migration, dynamic resource management etc, we
> need to trigger hotplug events through in-band interfaces.

acpi_device objects also have sysfs entries. Can they be used for such
in-bound interfaces?

> > Also, acpihp_dev_get_type() in core.c relies on PNP IDs that is embedded
> > in the file. This does not seem very flexible / extendable. One should
> > be able to add a handler for a new or vendor-specific PNP ID without
> > changing the core code. struct acpi_driver allows such extension today.
> Good catch. That's a design limitation currently. If the need arise, we could
> extend the core to support platform specific extensions. But that may be a
> little hard because all devices connecting to a slot will be configured/unconfigured
> in order of device types. If we introduce a platform specific device type,
> we need to change that logic too.

Right. This design does not allow someone to support a new device with
a loadable module without recompiling the kernel. This may be a problem
in some case.

> >> 3) Dynamically create/destroy ACPI hotplug slots. For example, new ACPI
> >> hotplug slots may be created when hot-adding a computer node if the node
> >> contains some memory hotplug slots.
> >
> > This is good, but it is necessary because you added the slots...
> Currently all ACPI hotplug drivers has an assumption that the ACPI namespace is
> constructed from static ACPI tables, or in other words, the ACPI namespace is
> static. Dynamically create/destroy ACPI hotplug slot is to get rid of such an
> assumption. If it's unnecessary, we may not support dynamic creating/destroying
> of ACPI hotplug slots.

Oh, I see. I agree that we need to support dynamic ACPI namespace. I
was confused since you stated this goal as the slot object being
dynamic.

> >> 4) Unify the way to handle ACPI hotplug events. All ACPI hotplug events
> >> for system devices will be handled by a generic ACPI hotplug driver,
> >> instead of handled by ACPI device drivers.
> >
> > It seems that acpihp_drv_slot_add() registers an ACPI notify handler
> > through .add_dev interface. Does it mean that a device must be marked
> > as present prior to hot-add operation..?
> acpihp_drv_slot_add() is called to bind the hotplug driver to a hotplug slot.
> So the ACPI hotplug event handler will be installed once the hotplug driver
> has been bound to a slot, no matter whether there are devices connecting to
> the slot.

acpi_bus_check_add() simply returns if a device is marked as !present
& !functioning. So, I thought acpihp_drv_slot_add() won't be called in
this case.

> >> 5) Solve dependencies among hotplug slots. You need first to remove the
> >> memory device before removing a physical processor if a hotpluggable memory
> >> device is connected to a hotpluggable physical processor.
> >
> > This is nice, but in your example, I'd expect that a container object
> > (as a node or socket) is used to generally represent such dependency
> > with topology. Such container object contains processor and memory
> > devices. When user needs to eject the whole, i.e. both processor and
> > memory, an eject request can be sent to the container object.
> There are two ways to get dependency relationships among hotplug slots. One is
> by analyzing ACPI namespace topology, as you have described. The other is by
> evaluating ACPI _EDL method. Some dependency relationships must be reported by
> ACPI _EDL method because the ACPI namespace topology can't reflect those dependencies.
> For examples:
> 1) To be compatible with Windows, the PCI host bridge (IIO) embedded in a physical
> processor may be present under _SB instead under the module device for the physical
> processor.

I believe the current version of Windows supports the module device
object. I remember there was such issue in the past, though. I am not
against of supporting _EDL, but it would be nice if we can avoid
additional complexity.

> 2) For NHM-EX/Boxboro chipset based platform, a Boxboro chipset is connected to
> two physical processors. So the Boxboro chipset must be removed first if you want
> to remove those two processor together. The ACPI namespace may be something like:
> \SB\
> |- SCK0
> |- SCK1
> |- PCI0

You should be able to use a module object containing SCK0, SCK1 and PCI0
in this case.

> 3) For a big system with partially connected topology, you may need to use ACPI _EDL
> to report dependencies among nodes. An possible topology as below:
> Node A <--->Node B
> ^ ^
> | |
> v v
> Node C <--->Node D

If the arrows represent their dependency, it seems a circular dependency
to me. I am not sure how _EDL can address this case.

Thanks,
-Toshi




> Regards!
> Gerry




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