Re: [Qemu-devel] [virtio-dev] [PATCH v3 2/7] vhost-pci-net: add vhost-pci-net

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 04:41:54PM +0000, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 05:55:45PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 02:59:50PM +0000, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> > > On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 11:33:11AM +0800, Wei Wang wrote:
> > > > Add the vhost-pci-net device emulation. The device uses bar 2 to expose
> > > > the remote VM's memory to the guest. The first 4KB of the the bar area
> > > > stores the metadata which describes the remote memory and vring info.
> > > 
> > > This device looks like the beginning of a new "vhost-pci" virtio device
> > > type.  There are layering violations:
> > > 
> > > 1. This has nothing to do with virtio-net or networking, it's purely
> > >    vhost-pci.  Why is it called vhost-pci-net instead of vhost-pci?
> > > 
> > > 2. VirtIODevice does not know about PCI.  It should work over virtio-ccw
> > >    or virtio-mmio.  This patch talks about BARs inside a VirtIODevice so
> > >    there is a problem here.
> > 
> > I think the point is how memory is exposed to another guest.  This
> > device exposes it as a pci bar. I don't think e.g. ccw can do this,
> > it's all hypercall-based.
> 
> Yes, that's why the BAR issue needs to be discussed.
> 
> In terms of the patches, the clean way to do it is for the
> vhost-pci device to have a memory region that is not called "BAR".  The
> virtio-pci transport can expose it as a BAR but the device doesn't need
> to know about it.  Other transports that support memory mapping could
> then work with this device too.

True, though mmio is pretty much a legacy transport at this point
at least from qemu perspective as arm devs don't seem to be working
on virtio 1.0 support in qemu. So I am not sure how much
of a priority should transport isolation be.

> The VIRTIO specification needs to capture this transport requirement
> somehow too so it's clear that the vhost device can only run over
> transports that support memory mapping.
> 
> That said, it's not clear to me why the vhost-pci device is a VIRTIO
> device.  It doesn't use virtqueues or the configuration space.  It only
> uses the vhost-user chardev and the mapped memory.  Isn't it better to
> make it a PCI device?
> 
> Stefan

Seems similar enough to me, except The roles of device and driver are
reversed here.

-- 
MST