mainline/server kernel NumaChip support enablement...

[Leann Ogasawara]

On Wed, 2012-02-08 at 16:09 +0800, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> Dear Ubuntu kernel team,

Hi Daniel,

> Support for Numascale's commodity large-SMP adapters [1] made it into 
> 3.2-rc1. It would be very helpful if you were to enable 
> CONFIG_X86_NUMACHIP on the mainline builds [2], and later for the server 
> kernels. With this enablement, it'll be easy to boot large (>168 cores) 
> systems using newer Ubuntu kernels.

I just want to clarify, when you say "later for the server kernels", do
you mean "later" as in the Q 12.10 release when we'll have a v3.3 (and
likely newer) kernel, or are you looking to have this supported in the
actively developed Precise 12.04 release which means we'd need to
cherry-pick the following from upstream:

commit 44b111b519160e33fdc41eadb39af86a24707edf
Author: Steffen Persvold <sp at numascale.com>
Date:   Tue Dec 6 00:07:26 2011 +0800

    x86: Add NumaChip support

commit 3fe54564a61f72982032423d24041dca30617ca2
Author: Daniel J Blueman <daniel at numascale-asia.com>
Date:   Wed Jan 25 14:35:49 2012 +0800

    x86/numachip: Drop unnecessary conflict with EDAC

Thanks,
Leann

> Since the APIC probe function (to select the NumaChip APIC handler) 
> looks at one string in an ACPI table, the boot-time overhead should be 
> only around a couple of hundred instructions, and there is no run-time 
> overhead.
> 
> Let me know if you need more information.
> 
> Many thanks,
>    Daniel
> 
> [1] http://numascale.com/numa_N323_adapter.html
> [2] http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/
> -- 
> Daniel J Blueman
> Principal Software Engineer, Numascale Asia
>