Re: [PATCH v3 3/8] drm/i915: Partition the fence registers for vGPU in i915 driver

Tvrtko Ursulin
2014-12-17T11:50:15Z

On 12/17/2014 11:25 AM, Yu, Zhang wrote:
> On 12/17/2014 7:06 PM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>>> It's not possible to allow guests direct access to the fence registers
>>>> though. And if every fence register access traps into the hypervisor
>>>> anyway the hypervisor can easily map the guest virtual fence to host
>>>> physical fence, so there is no need to tell the guest which fences it
>>>> owns, the number of fences is enough.
>>>
>>> That exactly is the part I don't understand - if it is not required to
>>> tell the guest which fences it owns, why it is required to say how many?
>>
>> There is a fixed assignment of fences to guests, so it's a fixed number.
>> But as the hypervisor is involved in any fence access anyway there is no
>> need for the guest to know which of the fences it owns, the hypervisor
>> can remap that transparently for the guest, without performance penalty.
> Thanks Gerd. Exactly.
> Although fence registers are parititioned to vGPU, it is not necessary
> for a vGPU to know the physical mmio addresses of the allocated fence
> registers.
> For example, vGPU 1 with fence size 4 can access the fence registers
> from 0x100000-10001f; at the same time, vGPU 2 with fence size 8 can
> access the fence registers from 0x100000-0x10003f. Although this seems
> conflicting, it does not matter. Because these mmio addresses are all
> supposed to be trapped in the host side, which will keep a record of the
> real fence offset of different vGPUs(say 0 for vGPU 1 and 4 for vGPU 2),
> and then does the remapping. Therefore, the physical operations on the
> fence register will be performed by host code on different ones(say,
> 0x100000-10001fh for vGPU 1 and 0x100020-0x10005f for vGPU 2).

Okay, I think I get it now. What I had in mind is not really possible
without a dedicated hypervisor<->guest communication channel. Or in
other words you would have to extend the way i915 allocates them from
mmio writes to something bi-directional.

Regards,

Tvrtko