powerpc/powernv: Always enable SMP when building powernv

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The powernv platform supports Power7 and later CPUs, all of which are
multithreaded and multicore.

As such we never build a SMP=n kernel for those machines, other than
possibly for debugging or running in a simulator.

In the debugging case we can get a similar effect by booting with
nr_cpus=1, or there's always the option of building a custom kernel with
SMP hacked out.

For running in simulators the code size reduction from building without
SMP is not particularly important, what matters is the number of
instructions executed. A quick test shows that a SMP=y kernel takes ~6%
more instructions to boot to a shell. Booting with nr_cpus=1 recovers
about half that deficit.

On the flip side, keeping the SMP=n kernel building can be a pain at
times. And although we've mostly kept it building in recent years, no
one is regularly testing that the SMP=n kernel actually boots and works
well on these machines.

Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>

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This commit is contained in:

Michael Ellerman 2017-04-05 12:44:50 +10:00

parent ebbe9d7d3a

commit 40e275653e

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arch/powerpc/platforms/powernv/Kconfig

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