Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH] pci: Use PCI aliases when determining device IOMMU address space

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

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 03:14:39PM +0800, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 11:26:18AM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > > On 3/29/19 11:49 AM, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > > > [Cc +Brijesh]
> > > > 
> > > > Hi Brijesh, will the change below require the IVRS to be updated to
> > > > include aliases for all BDF ranges behind a conventional bridge?  I
> > > > think the Linux code handles this regardless of the firmware provided
> > > > aliases, but is it required per spec for the ACPI tables to include
> > > > bridge aliases?  Thanks,
> > > >   
> > > 
> > > We do need to includes aliases in ACPI table. We need to populate the
> > > IVHD type 0x43 and 0x4 for alias range start and end. I believe host
> > > IVRS would contain similar information.
> > > 
> > > Suravee, please correct me if I am missing something?
> > 
> > I finally found some time to investigate this a little further, yes the
> > types mentioned are correct for defining start and end of an alias
> > range.  The challenge here is that these entries require a DeviceID,
> > which is defined as a BDF, AIUI.  The IVRS is created in QEMU, but bus
> > numbers are defined by the guest firmware, and potentially redefined by
> > the guest OS.  This makes it non-trivial to insert a few IVHDs into the
> > IVRS to describe alias ranges.  I'm wondering if the solution here is
> > to define a new linker-loader command that would instruct the guest to
> > write a bus number byte to a given offset for a described device.
> > These commands would be inserted before the checksum command, such that
> > these bus number updates are calculated as part of the checksum.
> > 
> > I'm imagining the command format would need to be able to distinguish
> > between the actual bus number of a described device, the secondary bus
> > number of the device, and the subordinate bus number of the device.
> > For describing the device, I'm envisioning stealing from the DMAR
> > definition, which already includes a bus number invariant mechanism to
> > describe a device, starting with a segment and root bus, follow a chain
> > of devfns to get to the target device.  Therefore the guest firmware
> > would follow the path to the described device, pick the desired bus
> > number, and write it to the indicated table offset.
> > 
> > Does this seem like a reasonable approach?  Better ideas?  I'm not
> > thrilled with the increased scope demanded by IVRS support, but so long
> > as we have an AMD IOMMU model, I don't see how to avoid it.  Thanks,
> 
> I don't have a better idea yet, but just want to say that accidentally
> I was trying to look into this as well starting from this week and I'd
> say that's mostly what I thought about too (I was still reading a bit
> seabios when I saw this email)... so at least this idea makes sense to
> me.
> 
> Would the guest OS still change the PCI bus number even after the
> firmware (BIOS/UEFI)?  Could I ask in what case would that happen?
> 
> Thanks,

Guest OSes can in theory rebalance resources. Changing bus numbers
would be useful if new bridges are added by hotplug.
In practice at least Linux doesn't do the rebalancing.
I think that if we start reporting PNP OS support in BIOS then windows
might start doing that more aggressively.


> -- 
> Peter Xu