Re: Discussion about virtual iommu support for Xen guest

["Dong, Eddie" <eddie.dong@intel.com>]

If enabling virtual Q35 solves the problem, it has the advantage: When more and more virtual IOMMU feature comes (likely), we can reuse the KVM code for Xen.
How big is the effort for virtual Q35?

Thx Eddie

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lan, Tianyu
> Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2016 4:30 PM
> To: jbeulich@suse.com; sstabellini@kernel.org; ian.jackson@eu.citrix.com;
> xen-devel@lists.xensource.com; Tian, Kevin <kevin.tian@intel.com>; Dong,
> Eddie <eddie.dong@intel.com>; Nakajima, Jun <jun.nakajima@intel.com>;
> yang.zhang.wz@gmail.com; anthony.perard@citrix.com
> Subject: Discussion about virtual iommu support for Xen guest
> 
> Hi All:
> We try pushing virtual iommu support for Xen guest and there are some
> features blocked by it.
> 
> Motivation:
> -----------------------
> 1) Add SVM(Shared Virtual Memory) support for Xen guest To support iGFX
> pass-through for SVM enabled devices, it requires virtual iommu support to
> emulate related registers and intercept/handle guest SVM configure in the
> VMM.
> 
> 2) Increase max vcpu support for one VM.
> 
> So far, max vcpu for Xen hvm guest is 128. For HPC(High Performance
> Computing) cloud computing, it requires more vcpus support in a single VM.
> The usage model is to create just one VM on a machine with the same number
> vcpus as logical cpus on the host and pin vcpu on each logical cpu in order to get
> good compute performance.
> 
> Intel Xeon phi KNL(Knights Landing) is dedicated to HPC market and supports
> 288 logical cpus. So we hope VM can support 288 vcpu to meet HPC
> requirement.
> 
> Current Linux kernel requires IR(interrupt remapping) when MAX APIC ID is >
> 255 because interrupt only can be delivered among 0~255 cpus without IR. IR in
> VM relies on the virtual iommu support.
> 
> KVM Virtual iommu support status
> ------------------------
> Current, Qemu has a basic virtual iommu to do address translation for virtual
> device and it only works for the Q35 machine type. KVM reuses it and Redhat is
> adding IR to support more than 255 vcpus.
> 
> How to add virtual iommu for Xen?
> -------------------------
> First idea came to my mind is to reuse Qemu virtual iommu but Xen didn't
> support Q35 so far. Enabling Q35 for Xen seems not a short term task.
> Anthony did some related jobs before.
> 
> I'd like to see your comments about how to implement virtual iommu for Xen.
> 
> 1) Reuse Qemu virtual iommu or write a separate one for Xen?
> 2) Enable Q35 for Xen to reuse Qemu virtual iommu?
> 
> Your comments are very appreciated. Thanks a lot.
> --
> Best regards
> Tianyu Lan
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