POWER Coregroup Support Coming With Linux 5.10

There is some new feature code in the IBM POWER CPU architecture's "-next" Git tree for the Linux 5.10 kernel.

Queued up this past week is coregroup support for POWER processors on Linux. This includes a cleanup of the PowerPC topologies code and adding the Coregroup support, which in this context is about a group/subset of cores on a die that share a resource.

This grouping of cores has the possibility of providing slight benefits to scheduler latency and throughput in some instances. Within this commit introducing the POWER Coregroup support there are various small benchmarks run in stressing the kernel scheduling code with this support enabled.

It's about time to run some fresh benchmarks on the Raptor Computing Systems' Talos and Blackbird hardware so I'll be sure to give Linux 5.10 a whirl and see how the performance looks in a wider set of benchmarks.