Re: [PATCH RFC 00/15] Add VFIO mediated device support and IMS support for the idxd driver.

[Jason Wang]

On 2020/5/9 äå8:21, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 05:09:09PM -0700, Raj, Ashok wrote:
> > Hi Jason
> >
> > On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 08:16:10PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 01:47:10PM -0700, Raj, Ashok wrote:
> > >
> > > > Even when uaccel was under development, one of the options
> > > > was to use VFIO as the transport, goal was the same i.e to keep
> > > > the user space have one interface.
> > > I feel a bit out of the loop here, uaccel isn't in today's kernel is
> > > it? I've heard about it for a while, it sounds very similar to RDMA,
> > > so I hope they took some of my advice...
> > I think since 5.7 maybe? drivers/misc/uacce. I don't think this is like
> > RDMA, its just a plain accelerator. There is no connection management,
> > memory registration or other things.. IB was my first job at Intel,
> > but saying that i would be giving my age away:)
> rdma was the first thing to do kernel bypass, all this stuff is like
> rdma at some level.. I see this looks like the 'warp driver' stuff
> redone
>
> Wow, lots wrong here. Oh well.
>
> > > putting emulation code back into them, except in a more dangerous
> > > kernel location. This does not seem like a net win to me.
> > Its not a whole lot of emulation right? mdev are soft partitioned. There is
> > just a single PF, but we can create a separate partition for the guest using
> > PASID along with the normal BDF (RID). And exposing a consistent PCI like
> > interface to user space you get everything else for free.
> >
> > Yes, its not SRIOV, but giving that interface to user space via VFIO, we get
> > all of that functionality without having to reinvent a different way to do it.
> >
> > vDPA went the other way, IRC, they went and put a HW implementation of what
> > virtio is in hardware. So they sort of fit the model. Here the instance
> > looks and feels like real hardware for the setup and control aspect.
> VDPA and this are very similar, of course it depends on the exact HW
> implementation.
>
> Jason


Actually this is not a must. Technically we can do ring/descriptor 
translation in the vDPA driver as what zerocopy AF_XDP did.

Thanks


>