Re: [PATCH 1/5] x86: Limit the number of processor bootup messages

From: Mike Travis
Date: Wed Nov 18 2009 - 12:18:26 EST




Borislav Petkov wrote:
Hi,

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 01:17:53PM -0600, Mike Travis wrote:
When there are a large number of processors in a system, there
is an excessive amount of messages sent to the system console.
It's estimated that with 4096 processors in a system, and the
console baudrate set to 56K, the startup messages will take
about 84 minutes to clear the serial port.

This set of patches limits the number of repetitious messages
which contain no additional information. Much of this information
is obtainable from the /proc and /sysfs. Some of the messages
are also sent to the kernel log buffer as KERN_DEBUG messages so
dmesg can be used to examine more closely any details specific to
a problem.

The list of message transformations....

For system_state == SYSTEM_BOOTING:

Booting Node 0, Processors #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 Ok.

Aren't we missing core 0 here?

Core 0 already booted as it's the Boot CPU. The info is earlier
in the log.


Booting Node 1, Processors #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 Ok.
..
Booting Node 3, Processors #56 #57 #58 #59 #60 #61 #62 #63 Ok.
Brought up 64 CPUs

Also, I'm getting

Booting Node 0, Processors #1
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)

There are other patches that deal with these:

http://git.kernel.org/tip/15cd8812ab2ce62a2f779e93a8398bdad752291a
http://git.kernel.org/tip/b01c845f0f2e3f9e54e6a78d5d56895f5b95e818

#2
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)
#3
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)
#4
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)
#5
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)
Ok.
Booting Node 1, Processors #6
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)
#7

...

and clearly CPU cache info is too verbose. We might want to
kill it since we have it replicated in /sysfs. In that case,
arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c:display_cacheinfo() could become obsolete
and we could remove it... Or is there some reason for dumping that
particular information during boot?


Yes, the above patches remove them entirely.

Thanks,
Mike
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