Re: [RFC PATCH V2 02/10] Qemu/VFIO: Add new VFIO_GET_PCI_CAP_INFO ioctl cmd definition

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2015-12-03 at 16:40 +0800, Lan, Tianyu wrote:
> On 12/3/2015 6:25 AM, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > I didn't seen a matching kernel patch series for this, but why is the
> > kernel more capable of doing this than userspace is already?
> The following link is the kernel patch.
> http://marc.info/?l=kvm&m=144837328920989&w=2
> 
> > These seem
> > like pointless ioctls, we're creating a purely virtual PCI capability,
> > the kernel doesn't really need to participate in that.
> 
> VFIO kernel driver has pci_config_map which indicates the PCI capability 
> position and length which helps to find free PCI config regs. Qemu side 
> doesn't have such info and can't get the exact table size of PCI 
> capability. If we want to add such support in the Qemu, needs duplicates 
> a lot of code of vfio_pci_configs.c in the Qemu.

That's an internal implementation detail of the kernel, not motivation
for creating a new userspace ABI.  QEMU can recreate this data on its
own.  The kernel is in no more of an authoritative position to determine
capability extents than userspace.

> > Also, why are we
> > restricting ourselves to standard capabilities?
> 
> This version is to check whether it's on the right way and We can extend
> this to pci extended capability later.
> 
> > That's often a crowded
> > space and we can't always know whether an area is free or not based only
> > on it being covered by a capability.  Some capabilities can also appear
> > more than once, so there's context that isn't being passed to the kernel
> > here.  Thanks,
> 
> The region outside of PCI capability are not passed to kernel or used by 
> Qemu for MSI/MSIX . It's possible to use these places for new 
> capability. One concerns is that guest driver may abuse them and quirk 
> of masking some special regs outside of capability maybe helpful.

That's not correct, see kernel commit
a7d1ea1c11b33bda2691f3294b4d735ed635535a.  Gaps between capabilities are
exposed with raw read-write access from the kernel and some drivers and
devices depend on this.  There's also no guarantee that there's a
sufficiently sized gap in conventional space.  Thanks,

Alex