Intel Platform Monitoring Telemetry Appears Destined For Linux 5.10

As first outlined earlier this year, Intel has been working on the Linux support for Platform Monitoring Technology as a new hardware telemetry feature first introduced with new Tigerlake hardware. It's looking like the initial Intel PMT support will come with Linux 5.10 while further work is being prepared that builds off its foundation.

Intel Platform Monitoring Technology is about a new hardware telemetry framework for enumerating and accessing hardware monitoring capabilities of a device. This telemetry is about being used within data centers and large organizations for managing their hardware / monitoring / collection of crash dumps for use internally and not any feature about trying to send hardware telemetry details back to Intel.

Information collected by Intel PMT is exposed to user-space in an XML format that various utilities can then be consumed in a unified manner. Much of the information is currently exposed via other means but with Intel PMT the hope is to have it more unified and easily consumed by these tools and in turn making the management easier by admins at large organizations and in data centers.

As of writing the PMT support isn't yet in mfd-next ahead of Linux 5.10, but according to an Intel engineer the work has been "accepted and awaiting merge."

This comes following new patches being sent out for adding Alder Lake support to the Intel PMT kernel code and out-of-band management services module (OOBMSM) for Xeon Sapphire Rapids as well as introducing a new PMT Crashlog driver. This PMT crashlog driver exposes new interfaces for controlling crashlog telemetry collected as well as exposing a character device for mapping the crashlog memory region so it can be accessed after a crashlog is recorded. Depending upon the code review and timing these extra patches might not land until after 5.10, but at least from the sounds of it the next Linux kernel cycle should be picking up Intel PMT support.