Planning to write detect / other functions?

[vsoch]

Hey Archspec,

I noticed that there aren't functions here for detect, etc., is this something you are planning to write, to be akin to the Python module? Thanks!

[alalazo]

Yes, this project currently is unfinished but the idea is to have feature parity with the Python API.

[vsoch]

Ah fantastic! I guess I'll subscribe for updates/notifications then. I'm working on a sibling library called containerspec that I'd like to use it with.

[vsoch]

hey @alalazo I'd really like to use this, any updates / plans for working on it?

[alalazo]

@vsoch Would you have time to help with implementing the command line tools? This has been since ever on my TODO list at very low priority... 😓

[vsoch]

I think I tried last August (2021) but I didn't know how to go about it. E.g., I know you can look at runtime.GOOS == "linux" but I wasn't sure about your plan to actually match to a specific arch/architecture. Do you have a design document or similar somewhere?

[alalazo]

Do you have a design document or similar somewhere?

Not really, and even if I had I think it would be outdated by now. For instance, at the time I started prototyping Go bindings I used statik to embed the JSON files in the Go package while reading around the best way to do it today is probably the embed package.

I think to discriminate among operating systems I would probably use runtime.GOOS as you said, but keep in mind my knowledge of Go only goes that far.

[vsoch]

Ok so even if you don’t know details of the implementation, do you have a general design idea? I’m just not familiar with how archspec works (or is supposed to) beyond doing the detecting. Is that something that needs to be figured out too? How does it work in the Python version?

[vsoch]

Have you seen https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/klauspost/cpuid/+/30e450625213468c7ec31fec6102dab6504adcc9/cpuid.go ?

[alalazo]

Detection in Python is coded in this module. It's based on inspecting /proc/cpuinfo on Linux, while on macOS we rely on sysctl info.

Have you seen https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/klauspost/cpuid/+/30e450625213468c7ec31fec6102dab6504adcc9/cpuid.go ?

No, I didn't. I guess it might be used instead of parsing the files/commands above directly.

[vsoch]

Here is the repository (linked at the top there): https://github.com/klauspost/cpuid what are the main differences between the library there and archspec? Is it just that archspec has a comparison / dag thing going on? The question I'm interested in is if we can use that library - e.g., is it possible to match results between there and the json here, and if not, what would we do if we parse some unknown microarchitecture?

[alalazo]

what are the main differences between the library there and archspec?

That library seems focused on hardware detection, so I'd expect it to give the same level of details as e.g. /proc/cpuinfo and to be unable to "reason" about architecture compatibility. archspec main focus is on binary compatibility, so it provides a few human-readable labels (e.g. bulldozer or graviton) and can "reason" about any of the architecture in the JSON file, while it can't distinguish two different chips that implement the same microarchitecture.

I think we can use the library you linked as an alternate method of detecting "raw" information on the current host and matching it to a known target in the JSON file.

[vsoch]

Gotcha! Yeah I can mess around with that! I will make some time soon.

[ChristianKniep]

Any progress on that issue? I am wondering myself how to make use of this package? The archspec-feature-discovery tool seems to execute the python version.

[vsoch]

I was interested for this tool I was working on https://github.com/vsoch/containerspec but I think I lost interest to work on it (August 2021!).