Re: drivers/pci: (and/or KVM): Slow PCI initialization during VM boot with passthrough of large BAR Nvidia GPUs on DGX H100

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

On Tue, 26 Nov 2024 16:18:26 -0600
Mitchell Augustin <mitchell.augustin@canonical.com> wrote:
> > The BAR space is walked, faulted, and mapped.  I'm sure you're at
> > least experiencing scaling issues of that with 128GB BARs.  
> 
> The part that is strange to me is that I don't see the initialization
> slowdown at all when the GPUs are hotplugged after boot completes.
> Isn't what you describe here also happening during the hotplugging
> process, or is it different in some way?

The only thing that comes to mind would be if you're using a vIOMMU and
it's configured in non-passthrough mode so the BARs aren't added to the
DMA address space after the vIOMMU is enabled during boot.  But your
virt-install command doesn't show a vIOMMU configuration for the VM.

If the slowness is confined to the guest kernel boot, can you share the
log of that boot with timestamps?  Thanks,

Alex