Bug 116399

Summary: numactl --cpubind and --show do not seem to match
Product: [openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0 Reporter: Gerald Pfeifer <gp>
Component: BasesystemAssignee: Andreas Kleen <ak>
Status: VERIFIED FIXED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: RC 1   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Gerald Pfeifer 2005-09-11 16:48:04 UTC 
This bug is about one of two things, and I don't know (yet), which one 
it is, or whether there are in fact two. 
 
The output of numactl --show refers to "nodebind", however the man page 
does not mention this concept (unlike cpubind or membind) and the output 
of numactl does not provide information on membind (if these two are 
indeed not the same). 
 
If the are the same, there seems to be a problem in displaying the result. 
For the two example below, I would have expected the output for "nodebind" 
and "membind" to be the same in both cases. 
 
(I hope I'm not missing something trivial here?) 
 
 gp@reger:~> numactl --cpubind=0 --membind=0 --show ls  
  policy: bind  
  preferred node: 0  
  interleavemask:  
  interleavenode: 0  
  nodebind: 0 1  
  membind: 0 
  
  gp@reger:~> numactl --cpubind=1 --membind=1 --show ls  
  policy: bind  
  preferred node: 1  
  interleavemask:  
  interleavenode: 0  
  nodebind:  
  membind: 1
Comment 1 Andreas Kleen 2005-09-11 22:32:11 UTC 
(is bugzilla for support requests now?) 

cpus are cpus and nodes are nodes but they're not the same.
Comment 2 Gerald Pfeifer 2005-09-11 23:01:19 UTC 
Let me try again.  
  
The command-line options are called "--membind"  and "--cpubind",  
respectively, which stand for "use memory on node(s)" and "use CPUs  
on node(s)".  
  
On the other hand, the output of the "--show" option refers to "membind"  
and "nodebind".  Since memory is memory, CPUs are CPUs, and nodes can  
contain either memory, or CPUs, or both, something does not seem consistent  
here. 
 
Or I'm just misreading the documentation, in which case I'd like to understand 
that and help improve that documentation.  The man page has the concepts of 
binding memory and/or CPUs in specific nodes, the output of --show has the 
concepts of binding binding memory and or entire nodes, but not CPUs?
Comment 3 Andreas Kleen 2006-01-18 05:44:03 UTC 
--cpubind binds nodes, not CPUs. That causes some confusion.

I clarified all this in SLES10 and there are separate options for cpus and
node bind now because too many people got confused.
Comment 4 Gerald Pfeifer 2006-11-29 14:42:27 UTC 
Verified, thanks!