[RFC PATCH v2 00/16] Initial support for machine creation via QMP

[Damien Hedde <damien.hedde@greensocs.com>]

Hi,

The goal of this work is to bring dynamic machine creation to QEMU:
we want to setup a machine without compiling a specific machine C
code. It would ease supporting highly configurable platforms (for
example resulting from an automated design flow). The requirements
for such configuration include begin able to specify the number of
cores, available peripherals, emmory mapping, IRQ mapping, etc.

This series focuses on the first step: populating a machine with
devices during its creation. We propose patches to support this
using QMP commands. This is a working set of patches and improves
over the earlier rfc (posted in May):
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-05/msg03706.html

Although it is working and could be merged, it is tag as an RFC:
we probably need to discuss the conditions for allowing a device to
be created at an early stage. Patches 6, 10 and 13, 15 and 16 depend
on such conditions and are subject to change. Other patches are
unrelated to this point.

We address several issues in this series. They are detailed below.

## 1. Stoping QEMU to populate the machine with devices

QEMU goes through several steps (called _machine phases_) when
creating the machine: 'no-machine', 'machine-created',
'accel-created', 'initialized', and finally 'ready'. At 'ready'
phase, QEMU is ready to start (see Paolo's page
https://wiki.qemu.org/User:Paolo_Bonzini/Machine_init_sequence for
more details).

Using the -preconfig CLI option, QEMU can be stopped today during
the 'accel-created' phase. Then the 'x-exit-preconfig' QMP command
triggers QEMU moving forwards to the completion of the machine
creation ('ready' phase).

The devices are created during the 'initialized' phase. 
In this phase the machine init() method has been executed and thus
machine properties have been handled. Although the sysbus exists and
the machine may have been populated by the init(), 
_machine_init_done_ notifiers have not been called yet. At this point
we can add more devices to a machine.

We propose to add 2 QMP commands:
+ The 'query-machine-phase' command would return the current machine
  phase.
+ The 'x-machine-init' command would advance the machine phase to
  'initialized'. 'x-exit-preconfig' could then still be used to
  advance to the last phase.

## 2. Adding devices

Right now, the user can create devices in 2 ways: using '-device' CLI
option or 'device_add' QMP command. Both are executed after the
machine is ready: such devices are hot-plugged. We propose to allow
'device_add' QMP command to be used during the 'initialized' phase.

In this series, we keep the constraint that the device must be
'user-creatable' (this is a device class flag). We do not see any
reason why a device the user can hot-plug could not be created at an
earlier stage.

This part is still RFC because, as Peter mentioned it (in this thread
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-08/msg01933.html),
we may want additional or distinct conditions for:
+ device we can hot-plug
+ device we can add in '-preconfig' (cold-plug)
We are open to suggestions. We could for example add a
'preconfig-creatable' or 'init-creatable' flag to device class, which
can identify a set of devices we can create this way.

The main addition is how we handle the case of sysbus devices. Sysbus
devices are particular because unlike, for example, pci devices, you
have to manually handle the memory mapping and interrupts wiring. So
right now, a sysbus device is dynamically creatable (using -device
CLI option or device_add QMP command) only if:
+ it is 'user_creatable' (like any other device),
+ and it is in the current machine sysbus device allow list.

In this series, we propose to relax the second constraint during the
earlier phases of machine creation so that when using -preconfig we
can create any 'user-creatable' sysbus device. When the machine
progresses to the 'ready' phase, sysbus devices creation will come
back to the legacy behavior: it will be possible only based on the
per-machine authorization basis.

For sysbus devices, wiring interrupts is not a problem as we can use
the 'qom-set' QMP command, but memory mapping is.

## 3. Memory mapping

There is no point allowing the creation sysbus devices if we cannot
map them onto the memory bus (the 'sysbus').

As far as we know, right now, there is no way to add memory mapping
for sysbus device using QMP commands. We propose a 'x-sysbus-mmio-map'
command to do this. This command would only be allowed during the
'initialized' phase when using -preconfig.

## 4. Working example

The last patches of the series add and modify devices in order to
build a working machine starting from the 'none' machine.

We add a new sysbus device modeling a simple memory (ram or rom). We
also set 'user-creatable' flag of some sysbus devices. These are
trivial patches, but they depends on the conditions we choose to allow
creating devices with -preconfig. Therefore, there is really no need
to review them until we settled on the device conditions first.

With these devices (memory, ibex_uart, ibex_plic) we can dynamically
configure a part (we did not add the timer, but we could) the
opentitan machine very easily and run firmwares which demonstrates
interrupts and memory-mapping are working.

We use the existing qmp-shell script to issue machine devices
from a qmp commands script file which contains qmp commands listed in
a file.

The following qmp commands add some memories, an interrupt controller
and an uart with an interrupt.

cat > opentitan.qmp <<EOF
x-machine-init

# ROM 0x00008000
device_add        driver=sysbus-memory id=rom size=0x4000 readonly=true
x-sysbus-mmio-map device=rom addr=32768

# FLASH 0x20000000
device_add        driver=sysbus-memory id=flash size=0x80000 readonly=true
x-sysbus-mmio-map device=flash addr=536870912

# RAM 0x10000000
device_add        driver=sysbus-memory id=ram size=0x10000
x-sysbus-mmio-map device=ram addr=268435456

# PLIC 0x41010000
device_add        driver=ibex-plic id=plic
x-sysbus-mmio-map device=plic addr=1090584576

# UART 0x40000000
device_add        driver=ibex-uart id=uart chardev=serial0
x-sysbus-mmio-map device=uart addr=1073741824
qom-set path=uart property=sysbus-irq[1] value=plic/unnamed-gpio-in[2]

x-exit-preconfig
EOF

We've put the opentitan.qmp and a firmware opentitan-echo.elf here
(among some other qmp machine files we are working on):
https://github.com/GreenSocs/qemu-qmp-machines
This firmware is just a small interrupt-based program echoing back
whatever is sent in the uart.

QEMU should be run using the following command:
qemu-system-riscv32 -preconfig -qmp unix:/tmp/qmp-socket,server \
    -display none \
    -M none -cpu lowrisc-ibex \
    -serial mon:stdio \
    -device loader,addr=0x8090,cpu-num=0 \
    -device loader,file=opentitan-hello.elf \

and in other terminal to do the configuration (grep is just here to
remove comments):
grep -v -e '^#' opentitan.qmp | qmp-shell -v /tmp/qmp-socket

Alternatively we can load the firmware on the existing machine and
observe the same behavior:
qemu-system-riscv32 -display none \
     -M opentitan \
     -serial mon:stdio \
     -kernel opentitan-echo.elf

We chose this example because it is very simple and does not need a
lot of devices.

This work has still a lot of limitations. Cpus config is done the
normal way (the C machine does that): in our example we used the
'none' machine. We have work to do for handling backend
connection (for example net/nic are complicated) because the way it
is done in machine C code does not translate easily in QMP commands.
Firmware loading is also a bit tricky. We plan to work on this in
follow-up series.

The series is organized as follows:
- Patches 1 to 3 add qmp support to stop QEMU at an early phase
  to populate the machine with devices.
- Patches 4 to 6 prepare and allow issuing device_add during this phase.
- Patches 7 to 10 prepare and allow creating sysbus device during this phase.
- Patches 11 and 12 add the x-sysbus-mmio-map QMP command
- Patch 13 add the memory sysbus device to model ram and rom 
- Patch 14 adds some documentation
- Patches 15 and 16 set 'user_creatable' flag of ibex_uart and ibex_plic.

This work is supported by Greensocs, Sifive and Xilinx.

Thanks,
--
Damien

Damien Hedde (12):
  softmmu/qdev-monitor: add error handling in qdev_set_id
  qdev-monitor: prevent conflicts between qmp/device_add and cli/-device
  hw/core/machine: add machine_class_is_dynamic_sysbus_dev_allowed
  qdev-monitor: Check sysbus device type before creating it
  hw/core/machine: Remove the dynamic sysbus devices type check
  qdev-monitor: allow adding any sysbus device before machine is ready
  softmmu/memory: add memory_region_try_add_subregion function
  add x-sysbus-mmio-map qmp command
  hw/mem/system-memory: add a memory sysbus device
  docs/system: add doc about the initialized machine phase and an
    example
  hw/char/ibex_uart: set user_creatable
  hw/intc/ibex_plic: set user_creatable

Mirela Grujic (4):
  rename MachineInitPhase enum constants for QAPI compatibility
  qapi: Implement query-machine-phase QMP command
  qapi: Implement x-machine-init QMP command
  qapi: Allow device_add to execute in machine initialized phase

 docs/system/managed-startup.rst | 77 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 qapi/machine.json               | 79 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 qapi/qdev.json                  | 24 ++++++++-
 include/exec/memory.h           | 22 +++++++++
 include/hw/boards.h             | 18 ++++++-
 include/hw/mem/sysbus-memory.h  | 32 ++++++++++++
 include/hw/qdev-core.h          | 30 +-----------
 include/monitor/qdev.h          | 25 +++++++++-
 hw/char/ibex_uart.c             |  1 +
 hw/core/machine-qmp-cmds.c      | 11 ++++-
 hw/core/machine.c               | 48 ++++++------------
 hw/core/qdev.c                  |  7 ++-
 hw/core/sysbus.c                | 41 ++++++++++++++++
 hw/intc/ibex_plic.c             |  1 +
 hw/mem/sysbus-memory.c          | 83 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 hw/pci/pci.c                    |  2 +-
 hw/usb/core.c                   |  2 +-
 hw/virtio/virtio-iommu.c        |  2 +-
 hw/xen/xen-legacy-backend.c     |  3 +-
 monitor/hmp.c                   |  2 +-
 monitor/misc.c                  |  2 +-
 softmmu/memory.c                | 22 ++++++---
 softmmu/qdev-monitor.c          | 86 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
 softmmu/vl.c                    | 23 ++++++---
 ui/console.c                    |  3 +-
 hw/mem/meson.build              |  2 +
 26 files changed, 547 insertions(+), 101 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 include/hw/mem/sysbus-memory.h
 create mode 100644 hw/mem/sysbus-memory.c

-- 
2.33.0