While this is done for all bitmaps, the original use case in mind was
for CPU masks and cpulist_parse() as described below.
It seems that a common configuration is to use the 1st couple cores for
housekeeping tasks. This tends to leave the remaining ones to form a
pool of similarly configured cores to take on the real workload of
interest to the user.
So on machine A - with 32 cores, it could be 0-3 for "system" and then
4-31 being used in boot args like nohz_full=, or rcu_nocbs= as part of
setting up the worker pool of CPUs.
But then newer machine B is added, and it has 48 cores, and so while
the 0-3 part remains unchanged, the pool setup cpu list becomes 4-47.
Multiple deployment becomes easier when we can just simply replace 31
and 47 with "N" and let the system substitute in the actual number at
boot; a number that it knows better than we do.
Cc: Yury Norov <yury.norov@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>
Cc: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Cc: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com>
Suggested-by: Yury Norov <yury.norov@gmail.com> # move it from CPU code
Acked-by: Yury Norov <yury.norov@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
2c4885d24e
