[coreboot] K8 HT architecture

Marc Jones Marc.Jones at amd.com
Sat Oct 25 02:33:49 CEST 2008


Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> On 24.10.2008 20:14, Marc Jones wrote:
>> Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm trying to understand how HT is modeled into PCI space so that I can
>>> propose the "right" way to handle it in the dts.
>>> Depending on whether I run lspci -t under coreboot or factory BIOS,
>>> different topologies will be displayed. That means looking at lspci is
>>> not going to tell me how the hardware really works.
>>>
>>> Given a standard setup with three HT links from the CPU, where do I find
>>> which device?
>>> Is PCI device 18.0 sort of a PCI bridge which has multiple PCI buses (HT
>>> links) behind itself?
>>> Or is the hardware organized in a completely different way? I'm
>>> especially curious about the MP scenario as depicted above. Where do the
>>> PCI functions of 18.[0123] reside?
>>>
>> This is why you don't want to mix the ht links and the pci bus. The
>> physical layout and the logical layout on pci are different. the lspci
>> -t view is the correct view.
> 
> Except that it sometimes differs (at least in numbering) between
> coreboot and factory BIOS, so I'm not sure which aspects of lspci -t are
> immutable and which are arbitrary.
Bus numbering is up to the BIOS.

> 
>> That is how the devices are addressed. Several different physical
>> layouts will get you the same logical layout because of how pci buses
>> are scanned.
> 
> Interesting.
> 
>> this
>> cpu --- pci
>>  |
>> cpu --- pci
>>
>> would be equivalent to this (although unlikely topology)
>> cpu --- pci
>>  | \--- pci
>> cpu
>>
>> I think it would be a mistake to over complicate the dts with the
>> physical connections.
> 
> Is the "pci" in your graphics above a bus or a device?
> From your answer it seems that "pci" represents a bus. Do 18.[0123],
> 19.[0123] and other processor devices all live on PCI bus 0?
yes

  Is that bus
> somewhat related to the buses attached via ncHT? 
in that ncHT looks like a pcibus

IIRC I once saw a
> machine where 18.[0123] was alone on bus 0 and all other PCI devices
> were on separate buses.
> 
There has be someother device on bus0. CPUs are not pci bridges.

> Taking the "everything is PCI" model, how would I specify the virtual
> PCI buses attached via ncHT? Are they children (secondary buses) of 18.0
> which would act like a PCI-to-PCI bridge?
it is another pci bus off of root. Just like bus0 and just like it looks 
  in lspci -t. Tom's email describes this in more detail.


>> They don't know (or need to know) what ht links are connecting the cpu
>> and what ones go to pci bus.
> 
> They need a way to specify settings for any given PCI device. Since most
> modern machines have multiple PCI devices with the same vendor/device
> ID, we have to be able to identify devices based on their logical path.
> For that, we have to model the logical PCI bus/device/tree reasonably
> well. I'm trying to do that, but no model seems to fit.

I disagree. How would a two devices of the same type require difference 
initialization? I think that defining where the devices are at build 
time is wrong. You only need the ID and the functions that device requires.


Marc

-- 
Marc Jones
Senior Firmware Engineer
(970) 226-9684 Office
mailto:Marc.Jones at amd.com
http://www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors





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