Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 2/2] uio: new driver to support PCI MSI-X

From: Alexander Duyck
Date: Thu Oct 01 2015 - 22:33:47 EST


On 10/01/2015 05:04 PM, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
On Thu, 1 Oct 2015 16:40:10 -0700
Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Do you really need to map IORESOURCE bars? Most drivers I can think of
don't use IO BARs anymore. Maybe we could look at just dropping the
code and adding it back later if we have a use case that absolutely
needs it.
Mapping is not strictly necessary, but for virtio it acts a way to communicate
the regions.

I think I see what you are saying. I was hoping we could get away from having to map any I/O ports but it looks like virtio is still using them for BAR 0, or at least that is what I am seeing on my VM with virtio_net. I was really hoping we could get away from that since a 16b address space is far too restrictive anyway.

Also how many devices actually need resources beyond BAR 0? I'm just
curious as I know BAR 2 on many of the Intel devices is the register
space related to MSI-X so now we have both the PCIe subsystem and user
space with access to this region.
VMXNet3 needs 2 bars. Most use only one.

So essentially we are needing to make exceptions for the virtual interfaces.

I guess there isn't much we can do then and we probably need to map any and all base address registers we can find for the given device. I was hoping for something a bit more surgical since we are opening a security hole of sorts, but I guess it can't be helped if we want to support multiple devices and they all have such radically different configurations.

- Alex
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