There's a growing number of drivers that support a specific x86 feature
or CPU. Currently loading these drivers currently on a generic
distribution requires various driver specific hacks and it often
doesn't work.
This patch adds auto probing for drivers based on the x86 cpuid
information, in particular based on vendor/family/model number
and also based on CPUID feature bits.
For example a common issue is not loading the SSE 4.2 accelerated
CRC module: this can significantly lower the performance of BTRFS
which relies on fast CRC.
Another issue is loading the right CPUFREQ driver for the current CPU.
Currently distributions often try all all possible driver until
one sticks, which is not really a good way to do this.
It works with existing udev without any changes. The code
exports the x86 information as a generic string in sysfs
that can be matched by udev's pattern matching.
This scheme does not support numeric ranges, so if you want to
handle e.g. ranges of model numbers they have to be encoded
in ASCII or simply all models or families listed. Fixing
that would require changing udev.
Another issue is that udev will happily load all drivers that match,
there is currently no nice way to stop a specific driver from
being loaded if it's not needed (e.g. if you don't need fast CRC)
But there are not that many cpu specific drivers around and they're
all not that bloated, so this isn't a particularly serious issue.
Originally this patch added the modalias to the normal cpu
sysdevs. However sysdevs don't have all the infrastructure
needed for udev, so it couldn't really autoload drivers.
This patch instead adds the CPU modaliases to the cpuid devices,
which are real devices with full support for udev. This implies
that the cpuid driver has to be loaded to use this.
This patch just adds infrastructure, some driver conversions
in followups.
Thanks to Kay for helping with some sysfs magic.
v2: Constifcation, some updates
v4: (trenn@suse.de):
- Use kzalloc instead of kmalloc to terminate modalias buffer
- Use uppercase hex values to match correctly against hex values containing
letters
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Cc: Jen Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Cc: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com>
Cc: Len Brown <lenb@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Renninger <trenn@suse.de>
Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Andi Kleen