Re: kvm PCI assignment & VFIO ramblings

[David Gibson <dwg@au1.ibm.com>]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 09:51:39AM -0700, Alex Williamson wrote:
> We had an extremely productive VFIO BoF on Monday.  Here's my attempt to
> capture the plan that I think we agreed to:
> 
> We need to address both the description and enforcement of device
> groups.  Groups are formed any time the iommu does not have resolution
> between a set of devices.  On x86, this typically happens when a
> PCI-to-PCI bridge exists between the set of devices and the iommu.  For
> Power, partitionable endpoints define a group.  Grouping information
> needs to be exposed for both userspace and kernel internal usage.  This
> will be a sysfs attribute setup by the iommu drivers.  Perhaps:
> 
> # cat /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:19.0/iommu_group
> 42
> 
> (I use a PCI example here, but attribute should not be PCI specific)

Ok.  Am I correct in thinking these group IDs are representing the
minimum granularity, and are therefore always static, defined only by
the connected hardware, not by configuration?

> >From there we have a few options.  In the BoF we discussed a model where
> binding a device to vfio creates a /dev/vfio$GROUP character device
> file.  This "group" fd provides provides dma mapping ioctls as well as
> ioctls to enumerate and return a "device" fd for each attached member of
> the group (similar to KVM_CREATE_VCPU).  We enforce grouping by
> returning an error on open() of the group fd if there are members of the
> group not bound to the vfio driver.  Each device fd would then support a
> similar set of ioctls and mapping (mmio/pio/config) interface as current
> vfio, except for the obvious domain and dma ioctls superseded by the
> group fd.

It seems a slightly strange distinction that the group device appears
when any device in the group is bound to vfio, but only becomes usable
when all devices are bound.

> Another valid model might be that /dev/vfio/$GROUP is created for all
> groups when the vfio module is loaded.  The group fd would allow open()
> and some set of iommu querying and device enumeration ioctls, but would
> error on dma mapping and retrieving device fds until all of the group
> devices are bound to the vfio driver.

Which is why I marginally prefer this model, although it's not a big
deal.

> In either case, the uiommu interface is removed entirely since dma
> mapping is done via the group fd.  As necessary in the future, we can
> define a more high performance dma mapping interface for streaming dma
> via the group fd.  I expect we'll also include architecture specific
> group ioctls to describe features and capabilities of the iommu.  The
> group fd will need to prevent concurrent open()s to maintain a 1:1 group
> to userspace process ownership model.

A 1:1 group<->process correspondance seems wrong to me. But there are
many ways you could legitimately write the userspace side of the code,
many of them involving some sort of concurrency.  Implementing that
concurrency as multiple processes (using explicit shared memory and/or
other IPC mechanisms to co-ordinate) seems a valid choice that we
shouldn't arbitrarily prohibit.

Obviously, only one UID may be permitted to have the group open at a
time, and I think that's enough to prevent them doing any worse than
shooting themselves in the foot.

> Also on the table is supporting non-PCI devices with vfio.  To do this,
> we need to generalize the read/write/mmap and irq eventfd interfaces.
> We could keep the same model of segmenting the device fd address space,
> perhaps adding ioctls to define the segment offset bit position or we
> could split each region into it's own fd (VFIO_GET_PCI_BAR_FD(0),
> VFIO_GET_PCI_CONFIG_FD(), VFIO_GET_MMIO_FD(3)), though we're already
> suffering some degree of fd bloat (group fd, device fd(s), interrupt
> event fd(s), per resource fd, etc).  For interrupts we can overload
> VFIO_SET_IRQ_EVENTFD to be either PCI INTx or non-PCI irq 

Sounds reasonable.

> (do non-PCI
> devices support MSI?).

They can.  Obviously they might not have exactly the same semantics as
PCI MSIs, but I know we have SoC systems with (non-PCI) on-die devices
whose interrupts are treated by the (also on-die) root interrupt
controller in the same way as PCI MSIs.

> For qemu, these changes imply we'd only support a model where we have a
> 1:1 group to iommu domain.  The current vfio driver could probably
> become vfio-pci as we might end up with more target specific vfio
> drivers for non-pci.  PCI should be able to maintain a simple -device
> vfio-pci,host=bb:dd.f to enable hotplug of individual devices.  We'll
> need to come up with extra options when we need to expose groups to
> guest for pvdma.

Are you saying that you'd no longer support the current x86 usage of
putting all of one guest's devices into a single domain?  If that's
not what you're saying, how would the domains - now made up of a
user's selection of groups, rather than individual devices - be
configured?

> Hope that captures it, feel free to jump in with corrections and
> suggestions.  Thanks,

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson