Re: [RFC] PCI: Unassigned Expansion ROM BARs

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

On Wed, 2015-09-23 at 20:21 -0700, Yinghai Lu wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 7:47 PM, Myron Stowe <myron.stowe@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The kernel expects device Expansion ROM BARs to be programmed with valid
> > values - even if the respective Expansion ROM's Enable bit is 0 (i.e. the
> > device’s expansion ROM address space is disabled).  This seems to be the
> > main contention point with said BIOS engineers.  If an Expansion ROM BAR is
> > not programmed, the kernel will attempt to find available resources and, if
> > successful, program it.  As this occurs various 'dmesg' entries
> > related to kernel's actions are output.
> ...
> > There is a kernel boot parameter, pci=norom, that is intended to disable the
> > kernel's resource assignment actions for Expansion ROMs that do not already
> > have BIOS assigned address ranges.  Note however, if I remember correctly,
> > that this only works if the Expansion ROM BAR is set to "0" by the BIOS
> > before hand-off.
> 
> option rom is used by legacy bios to enable booting from external device.
> usually BIOS call the option rom, so the firmware will be loaded to
> add on cards.
> and firmware get started.
> Also option rom would include tools that is used to configure behavior of cards
> like add/remove raid.
> 
> Also there is some use case that kernel driver try to get some parameters from
> BIOS. like intel soft raid ? --- bad practice !
> 
> I would like to treat option rom BAR as optional resources during
> resource allocation.
> 
> https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/yinghai/linux-yinghai.git/patch/?id=7f689da33302e4871fd18aee2c19abb5e3ea5261
> 
> Subject: PCI: Treat ROM resource as optional during realloc
> 
> Current on realloc path, we just ignore ROM resource if we can not assign
> them in first try.
> 
> Treat ROM resources as optional resources,so try to allocate them together
> with required ones, if can not assign them, could go with other required
> resources only, and try to allocate them second time in expand path.

Don't forget that the physical system boot may not be the only "boot" of
the PCI device.  We can assign a PCI device to a VM running on top of
the bare-metal OS, at which point the option ROM of the device may be
re-executed and the device re-initialized by the VM BIOS.  A BIOS
engineer that argues that the option ROM is unnecessary after bare-metal
BIOS boot is completely disregarding this use case.  We do have ways to
make this be a soft requirement, we can pass the option ROM as a file to
the VM, but we need to be able to rip the option ROM from the device in
order to do that, likely from a better behaved platform wrt option ROM
mapping.  Thanks,

Alex