Intel PMT Framework + Tiger Lake Telemetry Support Updated For Linux

Back in May I wrote about Intel working on Platform Monitoring Technology or hardware telemetry capabilities that are coming with Tiger Lake. The Linux support continues to be worked on for this "PMT" functionality although it looks like the work won't be ready in time for the imminent Linux 5.9 kernel merge window.

Intel Platform Monitoring Technology is about providing a hardware telemetry framework for enumerating and accessing hardware monitoring capabilities of a device. This is primarily intended for use within data centers and other large deployments and not the "telemetry" as in trying to report this data back to Intel. The Platform Monitoring Technology is to help organizations around manage their own hardware, monitoring, and easier access to device crash dumps. Collected data is exposed to the user in an XML format for various tools to then consume.

The forthcoming Tiger Lake hardware is the first to ship with Platform Monitoring Technology. This technology is officially summed up as:

Intel Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) is an architecture for enumerating and accessing hardware monitoring capabilities on a device. With customers increasingly asking for hardware telemetry, engineers not only have to figure out how to measure and collect data, but also how to deliver it and make it discoverable. The latter may be through some device specific method requiring device specific tools to collect the data. This in turn requires customers to manage a suite of different tools in order to collect the differing assortment of monitoring data on their systems. Even when such information can be provided in kernel drivers, they may require constant maintenance to update register mappings as they change with firmware updates and new versions of hardware. PMT provides a solution for discovering and reading telemetry from a device through a hardware agnostic framework that allows for updates to systems without requiring patches to the kernel or software tools.

This week the Intel Platform Monitoring Technology support for Linux hit its fifth round of code review. This latest round has mostly a variety of minor fixes and clarifications to the patches brought up during the reviews in recent weeks.

The V5 PMT patches plus Tiger Lake support can be found via this patch series. While it looks like work is settling down on this functionality, with the Linux 5.9 merge window potentially opening next week (otherwise the week after), it may be too close for getting it into this next Linux kernel cycle.