Re: [PATCH v4 04/14] PCI/P2PDMA: Clear ACS P2P flags for all devices behind switches

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 3:32 PM, Alex Williamson
<alex.williamson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 8 May 2018 16:10:19 -0600
> Logan Gunthorpe <logang@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On 08/05/18 04:03 PM, Alex Williamson wrote:
>> > If IOMMU grouping implies device assignment (because nobody else uses
>> > it to the same extent as device assignment) then the build-time option
>> > falls to pieces, we need a single kernel that can do both.  I think we
>> > need to get more clever about allowing the user to specify exactly at
>> > which points in the topology they want to disable isolation.  Thanks,
>>
>>
>> Yeah, so based on the discussion I'm leaning toward just having a
>> command line option that takes a list of BDFs and disables ACS for them.
>> (Essentially as Dan has suggested.) This avoids the shotgun.
>>
>> Then, the pci_p2pdma_distance command needs to check that ACS is
>> disabled for all bridges between the two devices. If this is not the
>> case, it returns -1. Future work can check if the EP has ATS support, in
>> which case it has to check for the ACS direct translated bit.
>>
>> A user then needs to either disable the IOMMU and/or add the command
>> line option to disable ACS for the specific downstream ports in the PCI
>> hierarchy. This means the IOMMU groups will be less granular but
>> presumably the person adding the command line argument understands this.
>>
>> We may also want to do some work so that there's informative dmesgs on
>> which BDFs need to be specified on the command line so it's not so
>> difficult for the user to figure out.
>
> I'd advise caution with a user supplied BDF approach, we have no
> guaranteed persistence for a device's PCI address.  Adding a device
> might renumber the buses, replacing a device with one that consumes
> more/less bus numbers can renumber the buses, motherboard firmware
> updates could renumber the buses, pci=assign-buses can renumber the
> buses, etc.  This is why the VT-d spec makes use of device paths when
> describing PCI hierarchies, firmware can't know what bus number will be
> assigned to a device, but it does know the base bus number and the path
> of devfns needed to get to it.  I don't know how we come up with an
> option that's easy enough for a user to understand, but reasonably
> robust against hardware changes.  Thanks,

True, but at the same time this feature is for "users with custom
hardware designed for purpose", I assume they would be willing to take
on the bus renumbering risk. It's already the case that
/sys/bus/pci/drivers/<x>/bind takes BDF, which is why it seemed to
make a similar interface for the command line. Ideally we could later
get something into ACPI or other platform firmware to arrange for
bridges to disable ACS by default if we see p2p becoming a
common-off-the-shelf feature. I.e. a BIOS switch to enable p2p in a
given PCI-E sub-domain.