Re: [RFC v4 0/3] vhost: introduce mdev based hardware backend

[Jason Wang]

On 2019/9/19 äå11:45, Tiwei Bie wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 09:08:11PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> > On 2019/9/18 äå10:32, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > > > > > So I have some questions:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > 1) Compared to method 2, what's the advantage of creating a new vhost char
> > > > > > device? I guess it's for keep the API compatibility?
> > > > > One benefit is that we can avoid doing vhost ioctls on
> > > > > VFIO device fd.
> > > > Yes, but any benefit from doing this?
> > > It does seem a bit more modular, but it's certainly not a big deal.
> > Ok, if we go this way, it could be as simple as provide some callback to
> > vhost, then vhost can just forward the ioctl through parent_ops.
> >
> > > > > > 2) For method 2, is there any easy way for user/admin to distinguish e.g
> > > > > > ordinary vfio-mdev for vhost from ordinary vfio-mdev?
> > > > > I think device-api could be a choice.
> > > > Ok.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > > > I saw you introduce
> > > > > > ops matching helper but it's not friendly to management.
> > > > > The ops matching helper is just to check whether a given
> > > > > vfio-device is based on a mdev device.
> > > > >
> > > > > > 3) A drawback of 1) and 2) is that it must follow vfio_device_ops that
> > > > > > assumes the parameter comes from userspace, it prevents support kernel
> > > > > > virtio drivers.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > 4) So comes the idea of method 3, since it register a new vhost-mdev driver,
> > > > > > we can use device specific ops instead of VFIO ones, then we can have a
> > > > > > common API between vDPA parent and vhost-mdev/virtio-mdev drivers.
> > > > > As the above draft shows, this requires introducing a new
> > > > > VFIO device driver. I think Alex's opinion matters here.
> > Just to clarify, a new type of mdev driver but provides dummy
> > vfio_device_ops for VFIO to make container DMA ioctl work.
> I see. Thanks! IIUC, you mean we can provide a very tiny
> VFIO device driver in drivers/vhost/mdev.c, e.g.:
>
> static int vfio_vhost_mdev_open(void *device_data)
> {
> 	if (!try_module_get(THIS_MODULE))
> 		return -ENODEV;
> 	return 0;
> }
>
> static void vfio_vhost_mdev_release(void *device_data)
> {
> 	module_put(THIS_MODULE);
> }
>
> static const struct vfio_device_ops vfio_vhost_mdev_dev_ops = {
> 	.name		= "vfio-vhost-mdev",
> 	.open		= vfio_vhost_mdev_open,
> 	.release	= vfio_vhost_mdev_release,
> };
>
> static int vhost_mdev_probe(struct device *dev)
> {
> 	struct mdev_device *mdev = to_mdev_device(dev);
>
> 	... Check the mdev device_id proposed in ...
> 	... https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/9/12/151 ...


To clarify, this should be done through the id_table fields in 
vhost_mdev_driver, and it should claim it supports virtio-mdev device only:


static struct mdev_class_id id_table[] = {
ÂÂÂ { MDEV_ID_VIRTIO },
ÂÂÂ { 0 },
};


static struct mdev_driver vhost_mdev_driver = {
ÂÂÂ ...
ÂÂÂ .id_table = id_table,
}


> 	return vfio_add_group_dev(dev, &vfio_vhost_mdev_dev_ops, mdev);


And in vfio_vhost_mdev_ops, all its need is to just implement vhost-net 
ioctl and translate them to virtio-mdev transport (e.g device_ops I 
proposed or ioctls other whatever other method) API. And it could have a 
dummy ops implementation for the other device_ops.


> }
>
> static void vhost_mdev_remove(struct device *dev)
> {
> 	vfio_del_group_dev(dev);
> }
>
> static struct mdev_driver vhost_mdev_driver = {
> 	.name	= "vhost_mdev",
> 	.probe	= vhost_mdev_probe,
> 	.remove	= vhost_mdev_remove,
> };
>
> So we can bind above mdev driver to the virtio-mdev compatible
> mdev devices when we want to use vhost-mdev.
>
> After binding above driver to the mdev device, we can setup IOMMU
> via VFIO and get VFIO device fd of this mdev device, and pass it
> to vhost fd (/dev/vhost-mdev) with a SET_BACKEND ioctl.


Then what vhost-mdev char device did is just forwarding ioctl back to 
this vfio device fd which seems a overkill. It's simpler that just do 
ioctl on the device ops directly.

Thanks


> Thanks,
> Tiwei
>
> > Thanks
> >
> >
> > > > Yes, it is.
> > > >
> > > > Thanks