> Documentation/cputopology.txt +106 says /sys/devices/system/cpu/possible > outputs cpu_possible_mask. That is the same as in num_possible_cpus(), so > first step would be to fix the buggy example code, imho. > > What perhaps could be done in a second step to reduce overhead is an option > for bpf(2) to pass in a cpu mask similarly as for sched_{get,set}affinity() > syscalls, where user space can construct a mask via CPU_SET(3). For the > syscall time, kernel would lock hot plugging via get_online_cpus() and > put_online_cpus(), it would check whether passed CPUs are online to query > and if so then it would copy the values into the user provided buffer. I'd > think this might be useful in a number of ways anyway. >
I like this idea. So in this case, the only the data at the cpu specified by user in the CPU_SET is copied to userspace, potentially have better performance than always copying the data * num_possible_cpus() bytes. Regards, William