Re: [PATCH 4/4] vfio-pci/zdev: Introduce the zPCI I/O vfio region
From: Matthew Rosato
Date: Tue Jan 26 2021 - 01:43:02 EST
On 1/22/21 6:48 PM, Alex Williamson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Jan 2021 15:02:30 -0500
Matthew Rosato <mjrosato@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Some s390 PCI devices (e.g. ISM) perform I/O operations that have very
specific requirements in terms of alignment as well as the patterns in
which the data is read/written. Allowing these to proceed through the
typical vfio_pci_bar_rw path will cause them to be broken in up in such a
way that these requirements can't be guaranteed. In addition, ISM devices
do not support the MIO codepaths that might be triggered on vfio I/O coming
from userspace; we must be able to ensure that these devices use the
non-MIO instructions. To facilitate this, provide a new vfio region by
which non-MIO instructions can be passed directly to the host kernel s390
PCI layer, to be reliably issued as non-MIO instructions.
This patch introduces the new vfio VFIO_REGION_SUBTYPE_IBM_ZPCI_IO region
and implements the ability to pass PCISTB and PCILG instructions over it,
as these are what is required for ISM devices.
There have been various discussions about splitting vfio-pci to allow
more device specific drivers rather adding duct tape and bailing wire
for various device specific features to extend vfio-pci. The latest
iteration is here[1]. Is it possible that such a solution could simply
provide the standard BAR region indexes, but with an implementation that
works on s390, rather than creating new device specific regions to
perform the same task? Thanks,
Alex
[1]https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210117181534.65724-1-mgurtovoy@xxxxxxxxxx/
Thanks for the pointer, I'll have to keep an eye on this. An approach
like this could solve some issues, but I think a main issue that still
remains with relying on the standard BAR region indexes (whether using
the current vfio-pci driver or a device-specific driver) is that QEMU
writes to said BAR memory region are happening in, at most, 8B chunks
(which then, in the current general-purpose vfio-pci code get further
split up into 4B iowrite operations). The alternate approach I'm
proposing here is allowing for the whole payload (4K) in a single
operation, which is significantly faster. So, I suspect even with a
device specific driver we'd want this sort of a region anyhow..