The systems I am working with have 80 or more cores in them. I’ve recently had to investigate processes around core start up. Here are my notes.
Continue readingStarting CPUs on ARM64
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Category Archives: Hardware
Functional Fixedness
Today I was reminded how easy it is to get fixed in your thinking.
The short lessons learned: if the Hostname fails (due to SSL) try the IP address.
Longer story:
Continue readingCan you run a Minecraft Server on an Ampere Computing based System?
Most Minecraft servers are run on x86_64 based hardware. Ampere AltraMax chips run AARCH64…which is the non-ARM specific way of saying ARM64 instruction set.
Continue readingLooking at ACPI PPTT from Userspace
The sys file system is used to expose Linux constructs to user space. One place we can see ACPI based information is in /sys/firmware/acpi
Continue readingACPI subsytem initialization
Many other modules might trigger ACPI device registration. This means the the basic ACPI subsystem has to be up and available before much of the Hardware is usable. Hence, we can see that the ACPI subsystem gets registered here. What I am not certain of is when does this code get called?
Continue readingACPI root pointer from UEFI System Table.
As I found out after I posted my lat entry , the correct way to find the Root pointer for the ACPI tables is to get it from the EFI System table. Where does that get set? Here’s the general flow: again, we start at init/main.c. start_kernel. However, the call is not in the ACPI code, but rather in setup_arch. The call chain goes
start-Kernel->setup_arch->efi_init->efi_get_fdt_params and that seems to pull it our of initial_boot_params. I can’t quite see where that is initialized. Yet. From context it looks like it is constructed out of the kernel command line parameters. Still learning….
Learning ACPI for ARM64 part 1: Finding the Root.
It started as a request from our tech lead: please help triage these patches. So I lookedat the set of patches and started with what looked like the simplest one:
Fix topology for Core scheduling.
It *just* reorders the code to call
store_cpu_topology(cpu);
before
notify_cpu_starting() .
Yeah…there is no such thing as a simple patch. These are my notes as I study and learn ACPI. My assumptions are here for all to see, and may well prove to be wrong.
Lets dig in.
Continue readingBuilding Linux tip-of-tree on an Ampere based system
I Have an Ampere Altra-Max/INGRASYS Yushan Server System running Centos 8 stream.
Because we are a chip manufacteror, we don’t sell end systems, we provide a reference platform that is a starting point for our customers to make a product. This leads to bizarre set of internal versus external names. One thing that you can rely on, however, is the identifier of the processor itself:
# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 BogoMIPS : 50.00 Features : fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp ssbs CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 8 CPU variant : 0x3 CPU part : 0xd0c CPU revision : 1 ... |
TO make this readable, use the utility lscpu:
[root@eng14sys-r 111 ~]# lscpu Architecture: aarch64 Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 80 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-79 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 80 Socket(s): 1 NUMA node(s): 1 Vendor ID: ARM BIOS Vendor ID: Ampere(R) Model: 1 Model name: Neoverse-N1 BIOS Model name: Ampere(R) Altra(R) Processor Stepping: r3p1 CPU max MHz: 3000.0000 CPU min MHz: 1000.0000 BogoMIPS: 50.00 L1d cache: 64K L1i cache: 64K L2 cache: 1024K NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-79 Flags: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp ssbs |
I want to build the latest Linus-repo Linux Kernel and run it on the server. Here’s the steps I went through.
Continue readingUnifying Audio with Pipewire
ALSA. Jack. PulseAudio. MIDI. Musescore. Jamulus.
My musical interactions with Linux are not the most complex in the world, but they ain’t trivial. The complexity of the Linux audio landscape has been a stumbling block so far. Pipewire has just gotten me past that.
The title of this article implies that you need to do something other than install Pipewire. So far, this is not true. On my system, at least, it Just works.
Continue readingStanding Desk
It’s been a while since I built my standing desk. Here’s the current state of it.
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