Re: kvm PCI assignment & VFIO ramblings

Alex Williamson
2011-08-24T14:56:13Z

On Wed, 2011-08-24 at 10:43 +0200, Joerg Roedel wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 03:30:06PM -0400, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-08-23 at 07:01 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>
> > > Could be tho in what form ? returning sysfs pathes ?
> >
> > I'm at a loss there, please suggest. I think we need an ioctl that
> > returns some kind of array of devices within the group and another that
> > maybe takes an index from that array and returns an fd for that device.
> > A sysfs path string might be a reasonable array element, but it sounds
> > like a pain to work with.
>
> Limiting to PCI we can just pass the BDF as the argument to optain the
> device-fd. For a more generic solution we need a unique identifier in
> some way which is unique across all 'struct device' instances in the
> system. As far as I know we don't have that yet (besides the sysfs-path)
> so we either add that or stick with bus-specific solutions.
>
> > > 1:1 process has the advantage of linking to an -mm which makes the whole
> > > mmu notifier business doable. How do you want to track down mappings and
> > > do the second level translation in the case of explicit map/unmap (like
> > > on power) if you are not tied to an mm_struct ?
> >
> > Right, I threw away the mmu notifier code that was originally part of
> > vfio because we can't do anything useful with it yet on x86. I
> > definitely don't want to prevent it where it makes sense though. Maybe
> > we just record current->mm on open and restrict subsequent opens to the
> > same.
>
> Hmm, I think we need io-page-fault support in the iommu-api then.

Yeah, when we can handle iommu page faults, this gets more interesting.

> > > Another aspect I don't see discussed is how we represent these things to
> > > the guest.
> > >
> > > On Power for example, I have a requirement that a given iommu domain is
> > > represented by a single dma window property in the device-tree. What
> > > that means is that that property needs to be either in the node of the
> > > device itself if there's only one device in the group or in a parent
> > > node (ie a bridge or host bridge) if there are multiple devices.
> > >
> > > Now I do -not- want to go down the path of simulating P2P bridges,
> > > besides we'll quickly run out of bus numbers if we go there.
> > >
> > > For us the most simple and logical approach (which is also what pHyp
> > > uses and what Linux handles well) is really to expose a given PCI host
> > > bridge per group to the guest. Believe it or not, it makes things
> > > easier :-)
> >
> > I'm all for easier. Why does exposing the bridge use less bus numbers
> > than emulating a bridge?
> >
> > On x86, I want to maintain that our default assignment is at the device
> > level. A user should be able to pick single or multiple devices from
> > across several groups and have them all show up as individual,
> > hotpluggable devices on bus 0 in the guest. Not surprisingly, we've
> > also seen cases where users try to attach a bridge to the guest,
> > assuming they'll get all the devices below the bridge, so I'd be in
> > favor of making this "just work" if possible too, though we may have to
> > prevent hotplug of those.
>
> A side-note: Might it be better to expose assigned devices in a guest on
> a seperate bus? This will make it easier to emulate an IOMMU for the
> guest inside qemu.

I think we want that option, sure. A lot of guests aren't going to
support hotplugging buses though, so I think our default, map the entire
guest model should still be using bus 0. The ACPI gets a lot more
complicated for that model too; dynamic SSDTs? Thanks,

Alex