Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

Yesterday I made a blog entry about the Intel CPU topology tool to help understand Xeon 5500 SMT and how it maps to Linux OS CPUs. I received a few emails about the tool. Some folks where having trouble figuring it out on their system (the tool works on other Xeons too).

This is just a quick blog entry to explain the tool for those readers and the possible future wayward googler.

In the following session snap you’ll see that the  CPU topology tool tar file is called  topo03062009.tar. In the session I do the following:

1. Extract the tarball
2. Change directories into the directory created by the tar extraction
3. Run the make for 64 bit Linux
4. Ignore the warnings
5. Run ls(1) to see what I picked up. Hmmm, there are no file names that appear to be executable.
6. I look into the script that builds the tool. I see the binary is produced into cpu_topology64.out. ( Uh, I think even a.out would have been more intuitive).
7. I use file(1) to make sure it is an executable
8. I run it but throw away all but the last 40 lines of output.

# ls -l topo*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 163840 Apr 13 21:16 topo03062009.tar
# tar xvf topo03062009.tar
topo/cpu_topo.c
topo/cputopology.h
topo/get_cpuid.asm
topo/get_cpuid_lix32.s
topo/get_cpuid_lix64.s
topo/Intel Source Code License Agreement.doc
topo/mk_32.bat
topo/mk_32.sh
topo/mk_64.bat
topo/mk_64.sh
topo/util_os.c
# cd topo
# sh ./mk_64.sh
cpu_topo.c: In function ?DumpCPUIDArray?:
cpu_topo.c:1857: warning: comparison is always false due to limited range of data type
# ls
cpu_topo.c          get_cpuid_lix32.s                        mk_32.bat  util_os.c
cpu_topology64.out  get_cpuid_lix64.o                        mk_32.sh   util_os.o
cputopology.h       get_cpuid_lix64.s                        mk_64.bat
get_cpuid.asm       Intel Source Code License Agreement.doc  mk_64.sh
#
# more mk*64*sh
#!/bin/sh

gcc -g -c get_cpuid_lix64.s -o get_cpuid_lix64.o
gcc -g -c util_os.c
gcc -g -DBUILD_MAIN cpu_topo.c -o cpu_topology64.out get_cpuid_lix64.o util_os.o
#
#
# file cpu_topology64.out
cpu_topology64.out: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, AMD x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9,
 dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, not stripped

# ./cpu_topology64.out  | tail -40
      +-----------------------------------------------+

Combined socket AffinityMask= 0xf0f

Package 1 Cache and Thread details

Box Description:
Cache  is cache level designator
Size   is cache size
OScpu# is cpu # as seen by OS
Core   is core#[_thread# if > 1 thread/core] inside socket
AffMsk is AffinityMask(extended hex) for core and thread
CmbMsk is Combined AffinityMask(extended hex) for hw threads sharing cache
       CmbMsk will differ from AffMsk if > 1 hw_thread/cache
Extended Hex replaces trailing zeroes with 'z#'
       where # is number of zeroes (so '8z5' is '0x800000')
      +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
Cache |  L1D      |  L1D      |  L1D      |  L1D      |
Size  |  32K      |  32K      |  32K      |  32K      |
OScpu#|    4    12|    5    13|    6    14|    7    15|
Core  |c0_t0 c0_t1|c1_t0 c1_t1|c2_t0 c2_t1|c3_t0 c3_t1|
AffMsk|   10   1z3|   20   2z3|   40   4z3|   80   8z3|
CmbMsk| 1010      | 2020      | 4040      | 8080      |
      +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+

Cache |  L1I      |  L1I      |  L1I      |  L1I      |
Size  |  32K      |  32K      |  32K      |  32K      |
      +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+

Cache |   L2      |   L2      |   L2      |   L2      |
Size  | 256K      | 256K      | 256K      | 256K      |
      +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+

Cache |   L3                                          |
Size  |   8M                                          |
CmbMsk| f0f0                                          |
      +-----------------------------------------------+