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                CPU hotplug Support in Linux(tm) Kernel

                Maintainers:

                CPU Hotplug Core:

                        Rusty Russell 

                        Srivatsa Vaddagiri 

                i386:

                        Zwane Mwaikambo 

                ppc64:

                        Nathan Lynch 

                        Joel Schopp 

                ia64/x86_64:

                        Ashok Raj 

                s390:

                        Heiko Carstens 

Authors: Ashok Raj 

Lots of feedback: Nathan Lynch ,

             Joel Schopp 

Introduction

Modern advances in system architectures have introduced advanced error

reporting and correction capabilities in processors. CPU architectures permit

partitioning support, where compute resources of a single CPU could be made

available to virtual machine environments. There are couple OEMS that

support NUMA hardware which are hot pluggable as well, where physical

node insertion and removal require support for CPU hotplug.

Such advances require CPUs available to a kernel to be removed either for

provisioning reasons, or for RAS purposes to keep an offending CPU off

system execution path. Hence the need for CPU hotplug support in the

Linux kernel.

A more novel use of CPU-hotplug support is its use today in suspend

resume support for SMP. Dual-core and HT support makes even

a laptop run SMP kernels which didn't support these methods. SMP support

for suspend/resume is a work in progress.

General Stuff about CPU Hotplug

--------------------------------

Command Line Switches

---------------------

maxcpus=n    Restrict boot time cpus to n. Say if you have 4 cpus, using

             maxcpus=2 will only boot 2. You can choose to bring the

             other cpus later online, read FAQ's for more info.

additional_cpus=n (*)   Use this to limit hotpluggable cpus. This option sets

                        cpu_possible_map = cpu_present_map + additional_cpus

(*) Option valid only for following architectures

- x86_64, ia64, s390

ia64 and x86_64 use the number of disabled local apics in ACPI tables MADT

to determine the number of potentially hot-pluggable cpus. The implementation

should only rely on this to count the # of cpus, but *MUST* not rely on the

apicid values in those tables for disabled apics. In the event BIOS doesn't

mark such hot-pluggable cpus as disabled entries, one could use this

parameter "additional_cpus=x" to represent those cpus in the cpu_possible_map.

s390 uses the number of cpus it detects at IPL time to also the number of bits

in cpu_possible_map. If it is desired to add additional cpus at a later time

the number should be specified using this option or the possible_cpus option.

possible_cpus=n         [s390 only] use this to set hotpluggable cpus.

                        This option sets possible_cpus bits in

                        cpu_possible_map. Thus keeping the numbers of bits set

                        constant even if the machine gets rebooted.

                        This option overrides additional_cpus.

CPU maps and such

-----------------

[More on cpumaps and primitive to manipulate, please check

include/linux/cpumask.h that has more descriptive text.]

cpu_possible_map: Bitmap of possible CPUs that can ever be available in the

system. This is used to allocate some boot time memory for per_cpu variables

that aren't designed to grow/shrink as CPUs are made available or removed.

Once set during boot time discovery phase, the map is static, i.e no bits

are added or removed anytime.  Trimming it accurately for your system needs

upfront can save some boot time memory. See below for how we use heuristics

in x86_64 case to keep this under check.

cpu_online_map: Bitmap of all CPUs currently online. Its set in __cpu_up()

after a cpu is available for kernel scheduling and ready to receive

interrupts from devices. Its cleared when a cpu is brought down using

__cpu_disable(), before which all OS services including interrupts are

migrated to another target CPU.

cpu_present_map: Bitmap of CPUs currently present in the system. Not all

of them may be online. When physical hotplug is processed by the relevant

subsystem (e.g ACPI) can change and new bit either be added or removed

from the map depending on the event is hot-add/hot-remove. There are currently

no locking rules as of now. Typical usage is to init topology during boot,

at which time hotplug is disabled.

You really dont need to manipulate any of the system cpu maps. They should

be read-only for most use. When setting up per-cpu resources almost always use

cpu_possible_map/for_each_possible_cpu() to iterate.

Never use anything other than cpumask_t to represent bitmap of CPUs.

        #include 

        for_each_possible_cpu     - Iterate over cpu_possible_map

        for_each_online_cpu       - Iterate over cpu_online_map

        for_each_present_cpu      - Iterate over cpu_present_map

        for_each_cpu_mask(x,mask) - Iterate over some random collection of cpu mask.

        #include 

        lock_cpu_hotplug() and unlock_cpu_hotplug():

The above calls are used to inhibit cpu hotplug operations. While holding the

cpucontrol mutex, cpu_online_map will not change. If you merely need to avoid

cpus going away, you could also use preempt_disable() and preempt_enable()

for those sections. Just remember the critical section cannot call any

function that can sleep or schedule this process away. The preempt_disable()

will work as long as stop_machine_run() is used to take a cpu down.

CPU Hotplug - Frequently Asked Questions.

Q: How to enable my kernel to support CPU hotplug?

A: When doing make defconfig, Enable CPU hotplug support

   "Processor type and Features" -> Support for Hotpluggable CPUs

Make sure that you have CONFIG_HOTPLUG, and CONFIG_SMP turned on as well.

You would need to enable CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU for SMP suspend/resume support

as well.

Q: What architectures support CPU hotplug?

A: As of 2.6.14, the following architectures support CPU hotplug.

i386 (Intel), ppc, ppc64, parisc, s390, ia64 and x86_64

Q: How to test if hotplug is supported on the newly built kernel?

A: You should now notice an entry in sysfs.

Check if sysfs is mounted, using the "mount" command. You should notice

an entry as shown below in the output.

        ....

        none on /sys type sysfs (rw)

        ....

If this is not mounted, do the following.

         #mkdir /sysfs

        #mount -t sysfs sys /sys

Now you should see entries for all present cpu, the following is an example

in a 8-way system.

        #pwd

        #/sys/devices/system/cpu

        #ls -l

        total 0

        drwxr-xr-x  10 root root 0 Sep 19 07:44 .

        drwxr-xr-x  13 root root 0 Sep 19 07:45 ..

        drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 0 Sep 19 07:44 cpu0

        drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 0 Sep 19 07:44 cpu1

        drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 0 Sep 19 07:44 cpu2

        drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 0 Sep 19 07:44 cpu3

        drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 0 Sep 19 07:44 cpu4

        drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 0 Sep 19 07:44 cpu5

        drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 0 Sep 19 07:44 cpu6

        drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 0 Sep 19 07:48 cpu7

Under each directory you would find an "online" file which is the control

file to logically online/offline a processor.

Q: Does hot-add/hot-remove refer to physical add/remove of cpus?

A: The usage of hot-add/remove may not be very consistently used in the code.

CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU enables logical online/offline capability in the kernel.

To support physical addition/removal, one would need some BIOS hooks and

the platform should have something like an attention button in PCI hotplug.

CONFIG_ACPI_HOTPLUG_CPU enables ACPI support for physical add/remove of CPUs.

Q: How do i logically offline a CPU?

A: Do the following.

        #echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/online

Once the logical offline is successful, check

        #cat /proc/interrupts

You should now not see the CPU that you removed. Also online file will report

the state as 0 when a cpu if offline and 1 when its online.

        #To display the current cpu state.

        #cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/online

Q: Why cant i remove CPU0 on some systems?

A: Some architectures may have some special dependency on a certain CPU.

For e.g in IA64 platforms we have ability to sent platform interrupts to the

OS. a.k.a Corrected Platform Error Interrupts (CPEI). In current ACPI

specifications, we didn't have a way to change the target CPU. Hence if the

current ACPI version doesn't support such re-direction, we disable that CPU

by making it not-removable.

In such cases you will also notice that the online file is missing under cpu0.

Q: How do i find out if a particular CPU is not removable?

A: Depending on the implementation, some architectures may show this by the

absence of the "online" file. This is done if it can be determined ahead of

time that this CPU cannot be removed.

In some situations, this can be a run time check, i.e if you try to remove the

last CPU, this will not be permitted. You can find such failures by

investigating the return value of the "echo" command.

Q: What happens when a CPU is being logically offlined?

A: The following happen, listed in no particular order :-)

- A notification is sent to in-kernel registered modules by sending an event

  CPU_DOWN_PREPARE or CPU_DOWN_PREPARE_FROZEN, depending on whether or not the

  CPU is being offlined while tasks are frozen due to a suspend operation in

  progress

- All processes are migrated away from this outgoing CPU to new CPUs.

  The new CPU is chosen from each process' current cpuset, which may be

  a subset of all online CPUs.

- All interrupts targeted to this CPU is migrated to a new CPU

- timers/bottom half/task lets are also migrated to a new CPU

- Once all services are migrated, kernel calls an arch specific routine

  __cpu_disable() to perform arch specific cleanup.

- Once this is successful, an event for successful cleanup is sent by an event

  CPU_DEAD (or CPU_DEAD_FROZEN if tasks are frozen due to a suspend while the

  CPU is being offlined).

  "It is expected that each service cleans up when the CPU_DOWN_PREPARE

  notifier is called, when CPU_DEAD is called its expected there is nothing

  running on behalf of this CPU that was offlined"

Q: If i have some kernel code that needs to be aware of CPU arrival and

   departure, how to i arrange for proper notification?

A: This is what you would need in your kernel code to receive notifications.

        #include 

        static int __cpuinit foobar_cpu_callback(struct notifier_block *nfb,

                                            unsigned long action, void *hcpu)

        {

                unsigned int cpu = (unsigned long)hcpu;

                switch (action) {

                case CPU_ONLINE:

                case CPU_ONLINE_FROZEN:

                        foobar_online_action(cpu);

                        break;

                case CPU_DEAD:

                case CPU_DEAD_FROZEN:

                        foobar_dead_action(cpu);

                        break;

                }

                return NOTIFY_OK;

        }

        static struct notifier_block __cpuinitdata foobar_cpu_notifer =

        {

           .notifier_call = foobar_cpu_callback,

        };

You need to call register_cpu_notifier() from your init function.

Init functions could be of two types:

1. early init (init function called when only the boot processor is online).

2. late init (init function called _after_ all the CPUs are online).

For the first case, you should add the following to your init function

        register_cpu_notifier(&foobar_cpu_notifier);

For the second case, you should add the following to your init function

        register_hotcpu_notifier(&foobar_cpu_notifier);

You can fail PREPARE notifiers if something doesn't work to prepare resources.

This will stop the activity and send a following CANCELED event back.

CPU_DEAD should not be failed, its just a goodness indication, but bad

things will happen if a notifier in path sent a BAD notify code.

Q: I don't see my action being called for all CPUs already up and running?

A: Yes, CPU notifiers are called only when new CPUs are on-lined or offlined.

   If you need to perform some action for each cpu already in the system, then

        for_each_online_cpu(i) {

                foobar_cpu_callback(&foobar_cpu_notifier, CPU_UP_PREPARE, i);

                foobar_cpu_callback(&foobar_cpu_notifier, CPU_ONLINE, i);

        }

Q: If i would like to develop cpu hotplug support for a new architecture,

   what do i need at a minimum?

A: The following are what is required for CPU hotplug infrastructure to work

   correctly.

    - Make sure you have an entry in Kconfig to enable CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU

    - __cpu_up()        - Arch interface to bring up a CPU

    - __cpu_disable()   - Arch interface to shutdown a CPU, no more interrupts

                          can be handled by the kernel after the routine

                          returns. Including local APIC timers etc are

                          shutdown.

     - __cpu_die()      - This actually supposed to ensure death of the CPU.

                          Actually look at some example code in other arch

                          that implement CPU hotplug. The processor is taken

                          down from the idle() loop for that specific

                          architecture. __cpu_die() typically waits for some

                          per_cpu state to be set, to ensure the processor

                          dead routine is called to be sure positively.

Q: I need to ensure that a particular cpu is not removed when there is some

   work specific to this cpu is in progress.

A: First switch the current thread context to preferred cpu

        int my_func_on_cpu(int cpu)

        {

                cpumask_t saved_mask, new_mask = CPU_MASK_NONE;

                int curr_cpu, err = 0;

                saved_mask = current->cpus_allowed;

                cpu_set(cpu, new_mask);

                err = set_cpus_allowed(current, new_mask);

                if (err)

                        return err;

                /*

                 * If we got scheduled out just after the return from

                 * set_cpus_allowed() before running the work, this ensures

                 * we stay locked.

                 */

                curr_cpu = get_cpu();

                if (curr_cpu != cpu) {

                        err = -EAGAIN;

                        goto ret;

                } else {

                        /*

                         * Do work : But cant sleep, since get_cpu() disables preempt

                         */

                }

                ret:

                        put_cpu();

                        set_cpus_allowed(current, saved_mask);

                        return err;

                }

Q: How do we determine how many CPUs are available for hotplug.

A: There is no clear spec defined way from ACPI that can give us that

   information today. Based on some input from Natalie of Unisys,

   that the ACPI MADT (Multiple APIC Description Tables) marks those possible

   CPUs in a system with disabled status.

   Andi implemented some simple heuristics that count the number of disabled

   CPUs in MADT as hotpluggable CPUS.  In the case there are no disabled CPUS

   we assume 1/2 the number of CPUs currently present can be hotplugged.

   Caveat: Today's ACPI MADT can only provide 256 entries since the apicid field

   in MADT is only 8 bits.

User Space Notification

Hotplug support for devices is common in Linux today. Its being used today to

support automatic configuration of network, usb and pci devices. A hotplug

event can be used to invoke an agent script to perform the configuration task.

You can add /etc/hotplug/cpu.agent to handle hotplug notification user space

scripts.

        #!/bin/bash

        # $Id: cpu.agent

        # Kernel hotplug params include:

        #ACTION=%s [online or offline]

        #DEVPATH=%s

        #

        cd /etc/hotplug

        . ./hotplug.functions

        case $ACTION in

                online)

                        echo `date` ":cpu.agent" add cpu >> /tmp/hotplug.txt

                        ;;

                offline)

                        echo `date` ":cpu.agent" remove cpu >>/tmp/hotplug.txt

                        ;;

                *)

                        debug_mesg CPU $ACTION event not supported

        exit 1

        ;;

        esac