Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC/RFT PATCH v2 0/3] KVM: Introduce KVM_MEM_UNCACHED

[Christoffer Dall <christoffer.dall@linaro.org>]

On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 02:28:49PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> 
> 
> On 14/05/2015 14:24, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> > On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 02:08:49PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On 14/05/2015 14:00, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> >>> So, getting back to my original question.  Is the point then that UEFI
> >>> must assume (from ACPI/DT) the cache-coherency properties of the PCI
> >>> controller which exists in hardware on the system you're running on,
> >>> even for the virtual PCI bus because that will be the semantics for
> >>> assigned devices?
> >>>
> >>> And in that case, we have no way to distinguish between passthrough
> >>> devices and virtual devices plugged into the virtual PCI bus?
> >>
> >> Well, we could use the subsystem id.  But it's a hack, and may cause
> >> incompatibilities with some drivers.  Michael, any ideas?
> >>
> >>> What about the idea of having two virtual PCI buses on your system where
> >>> one is always cache-coherent and uses for virtual devices, and the other
> >>> is whatever the hardware is and used for passthrough devices?
> >>
> >> I think that was rejected before.
> > 
> > Do you remember where?  I just remember Catalin mentioning the idea to
> > me verbally.
> 
> In the last centithread on the subject. :)
> 
> At least I and Peter disagreed.  It's not about the heavy added use of
> resources, it's more about it being really easy to misconfigure.
> 
> > But I'm still not sure why UEFI/Linux currently sees our PCI bus as
> > being non-coherent when in fact it is and we have no passthrough issues
> > currently.  Are all PCI controllers always non-coherent for some reason
> > and therefore we model it as such too?
> 
> Well, PCI BARs are generally MMIO resources, and hence should not be cached.
> 
> As an optimization, OS drivers can mark them as cacheable or
> write-combining or something like that, but in general it's a safe
> default to leave them uncached---one would think.
> 
ok, I guess this series makes sense then, assuming it works, and
assuming we don't kill performance by going to RAM all the time when we
don't have to...

Thanks,
-Christoffer