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+============================
+NUMA resource associativity
+============================
+
+Associativity represents the groupings of the various platform resources into
+domains of substantially similar mean performance relative to resources outside
+of that domain. Resources subsets of a given domain that exhibit better
+performance relative to each other than relative to other resources subsets
+are represented as being members of a sub-grouping domain. This performance
+characteristic is presented in terms of NUMA node distance within the Linux kernel.
+From the platform view, these groups are also referred to as domains.
+
+PAPR interface currently supports different ways of communicating these resource
+grouping details to the OS. These are referred to as Form 0, Form 1 and Form2
+associativity grouping. Form 0 is the oldest format and is now considered deprecated.
+
+Hypervisor indicates the type/form of associativity used via "ibm,architecture-vec-5 property".
+Bit 0 of byte 5 in the "ibm,architecture-vec-5" property indicates usage of Form 0 or Form 1.
+A value of 1 indicates the usage of Form 1 associativity. For Form 2 associativity
+bit 2 of byte 5 in the "ibm,architecture-vec-5" property is used.
+
+Form 0
+------
+Form 0 associativity supports only two NUMA distances (LOCAL and REMOTE).
+
+Form 1
+------
+With Form 1 a combination of ibm,associativity-reference-points, and ibm,associativity
+device tree properties are used to determine the NUMA distance between resource groups/domains.
+
+The “ibm,associativity” property contains a list of one or more numbers (domainID)
+representing the resource’s platform grouping domains.
+
+The “ibm,associativity-reference-points” property contains a list of one or more numbers
+(domainID index) that represents the 1 based ordinal in the associativity lists.
+The list of domainID indexes represents an increasing hierarchy of resource grouping.
+
+ex:
+{ primary domainID index, secondary domainID index, tertiary domainID index.. }
+
+Linux kernel uses the domainID at the primary domainID index as the NUMA node id.
+Linux kernel computes NUMA distance between two domains by recursively comparing
+if they belong to the same higher-level domains. For mismatch at every higher
+level of the resource group, the kernel doubles the NUMA distance between the
+comparing domains.
+
+Form 2
+-------
+Form 2 associativity format adds separate device tree properties representing NUMA node distance
+thereby making the node distance computation flexible. Form 2 also allows flexible primary
+domain numbering. With numa distance computation now detached from the index value in
+"ibm,associativity-reference-points" property, Form 2 allows a large number of primary domain
+ids at the same domainID index representing resource groups of different performance/latency
+characteristics.
+
+Hypervisor indicates the usage of FORM2 associativity using bit 2 of byte 5 in the
+"ibm,architecture-vec-5" property.
+
+"ibm,numa-lookup-index-table" property contains a list of one or more numbers representing
+the domainIDs present in the system. The offset of the domainID in this property is
+used as an index while computing numa distance information via "ibm,numa-distance-table".
+
+prop-encoded-array: The number N of the domainIDs encoded as with encode-int, followed by
+N domainID encoded as with encode-int
+
+For ex:
+"ibm,numa-lookup-index-table" = {4, 0, 8, 250, 252}. The offset of domainID 8 (2) is used when
+computing the distance of domain 8 from other domains present in the system. For the rest of
+this document, this offset will be referred to as domain distance offset.
+
+"ibm,numa-distance-table" property contains a list of one or more numbers representing the NUMA
+distance between resource groups/domains present in the system.
+
+prop-encoded-array: The number N of the distance values encoded as with encode-int, followed by
+N distance values encoded as with encode-bytes. The max distance value we could encode is 255.
+The number N must be equal to the square of m where m is the number of domainIDs in the
+numa-lookup-index-table.
+
+For ex:
+ibm,numa-lookup-index-table = <3 0 8 40>;
+ibm,numa-distace-table = <9>, /bits/ 8 < 10 20 80 20 10 160 80 160 10>;
+
+::
+
+ | 0 8 40
+ --|------------
+ |
+ 0 | 10 20 80
+ |
+ 8 | 20 10 160
+ |
+ 40| 80 160 10
+
+A possible "ibm,associativity" property for resources in node 0, 8 and 40
+
+{ 3, 6, 7, 0 }
+{ 3, 6, 9, 8 }
+{ 3, 6, 7, 40}
+
+With "ibm,associativity-reference-points" { 0x3 }
+
+"ibm,lookup-index-table" helps in having a compact representation of distance matrix.
+Since domainID can be sparse, the matrix of distances can also be effectively sparse.
+With "ibm,lookup-index-table" we can achieve a compact representation of
+distance information.