Re: [RFC 0/4] pci/sriov: support VFs dynamic addition

Oliver O'Halloran
2022-11-15T02:06:43Z

On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 1:08 AM Longpeng (Mike, Cloud Infrastructure
Service Product Dept.) <longpeng2@huawei.com> wrote:
>
> *snip*
>
> Adding 2K+ VFs to the sysfs need too much time.
>
> Look at the bottomhalf of the hypervisor live update:
> kexec --> add 2K VFs --> restore VMs
>
> The downtime can be reduced if the sequence is:
> kexec --> add 100 VFs（the VMs used） --> resotre VMs --> add 1.9K VFs

Right, so you want to add VFs in batches rather than all at once.
Personally I think the bitmap approach is error prone since it renders
the meaning of pf_dev->sriov->num_VFs unclear and there's some hairy
code in arch/powerpc/ that approach will likely break. A better
approach would be to add an attribute to control the number of VFs
enabled in hardware and allowing sriov_numvfs to accept any number
between the current value and sriov_hw_numvfs. e.g. your HV setup
would look something like:

echo 2048 > sriov_hw_numvfs
echo 100 > sriov_numvfs

# time passes
echo 2048 > sriov_numvfs

This would be fairly simple to implement and you can make it backwards
compatible by having writes to sriov_numvfs retain their current
semantics if sriov_hw_numvfs is zero.