On Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:26:21 PDT
Giorgio Davanzo <giorgio.davanzo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rather than curiosity, ignorance killed the cat. Thanks, I'm not
> missing cpus. Just to get it straight: am I seeing everything
> through some sort of VM? That's why powertop & co. show only one
> processor? Then I'm wondering WHY they're just replicating infos
> taken from one cpu...
I'm not that familiar with powertop (and forgot what the &co was), but
it's a multiplatform systems monitoring tool - written for Linux,
even. Such tools aren't really very reliable for per-cpu information
on mp systems other than the native ones, because the API's for
getting that information from the kernel aren't standardized. There
isn't even a standard for what information should be collected.
So unless whoever ported the tool to Solaris also rewrote the per-cpu
information collection code to use Solaris's APIs - assuming it
exists; Solaris simply may not provide the data in form those tools
can use - it'll fall back on the standard APIs, which just report
aggregate system behavior, and report those numbers. Sounds like in
this case something is seeing N cpus and reporting the aggregate
numbers for each of them as the best it can do with what's available.
In other words, the fault isn't in Solaris (except in that Solaris
doesn't use a Linux kernel), it's in Powertop (&co.) in that they
don't know how to get the information you want from them from the
Solaris kernel.
To get reliable data about per-cpu behavior on a system, you really
need to use tools designed for that system.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org
