Re: [PATCH v7 15/18] NTB: Add support for EPF PCI-Express Non-Transparent Bridge

Arnd Bergmann
2020-11-12T13:25:19Z

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 4:42 PM Kishon Vijay Abraham I <kishon@ti.com> wrote:
> On 10/11/20 8:29 pm, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 3:20 PM Kishon Vijay Abraham I <kishon@ti.com> wrote:
> >> On 10/11/20 7:55 am, Sherry Sun wrote:
> >
> >>> But for VOP, only two boards are needed(one board as host and one board as card) to realize the
> >>> communication between the two systems, so my question is what are the advantages of using NTB?
> >>
> >> NTB is a bridge that facilitates communication between two different
> >> systems. So it by itself will not be source or sink of any data unlike a
> >> normal EP to RP system (or the VOP) which will be source or sink of data.
> >>
> >>> Because I think the architecture of NTB seems more complicated. Many thanks!
> >>
> >> yeah, I think it enables a different use case all together. Consider you
> >> have two x86 HOST PCs (having RP) and they have to be communicate using
> >> PCIe. NTB can be used in such cases for the two x86 PCs to communicate
> >> with each other over PCIe, which wouldn't be possible without NTB.
> >
> > I think for VOP, we should have an abstraction that can work on either NTB
> > or directly on the endpoint framework but provide an interface that then
> > lets you create logical devices the same way.
> >
> > Doing VOP based on NTB plus the new NTB_EPF driver would also
> > work and just move the abstraction somewhere else, but I guess it
> > would complicate setting it up for those users that only care about the
> > simpler endpoint case.
>
> I'm not sure if you've got a chance to look at [1], where I added
> support for RP<->EP system both running Linux, with EP configured using
> Linux EP framework (as well as HOST ports connected to NTB switch,
> patches 20 and 21, that uses the Linux NTB framework) to communicate
> using virtio over PCIe.
>
> The cover-letter [1] shows a picture of the two use cases supported in
> that series.
>
> [1] -> http://lore.kernel.org/r/20200702082143.25259-1-kishon@ti.com

No, I missed, that, thanks for pointing me to it!

This looks very promising indeed, I need to read up on the whole
discussion there. I also see your slides at [1] that help do explain some
of it. I have one fundamental question that I can't figure out from
the description, maybe you can help me here:

How is the configuration managed, taking the EP case as an
example? Your UseCase1 example sounds like the system that owns
the EP hardware is the one that turns the EP into a vhost device,
and creates a vhost-rpmsg device on top, while the RC side would
probe the pci-vhost and then detect a virtio-rpmsg device to talk to.
Can it also do the opposite, so you end up with e.g. a virtio-net
device on the EP side and vhost-net on the RC?

Arnd

[1] https://linuxplumbersconf.org/event/7/contributions/849/attachments/642/1175/Virtio_for_PCIe_RC_EP_NTB.pdf