Re: [PATCH 0/2] rust: pci: expose is_virtfn() and reject VFs in nova-core

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2025 at 02:08:27PM +0200, Danilo Krummrich wrote:

> Why? What about other upstream drivers that clearly assert that they don't
> support VFs?

They shouldn't be doing that either. There is lots of junk in Linux,
that doesn't mean it should be made first-class to encourage more
people to do the wrong thing.

> Why would we want to force them to try to boot to a point where
> they "naturally" fail?

We want them to work.
 
> https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.17/source/drivers/net/ethernet/realtek/rtase/rtase_main.c#L2195
> https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.17/source/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/ice/ice_main.c#L5266
> https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.17/source/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/igb/igb_main.c#L3221

This usage seems wrong to me:

commit 50ac7479846053ca8054be833c1594e64de496bb
Author: Anirudh Venkataramanan <anirudh.venkataramanan@xxxxxxxxx>
Date:   Wed Jul 28 12:39:10 2021 -0700

    ice: Prevent probing virtual functions
    
    The userspace utility "driverctl" can be used to change/override the
    system's default driver choices. This is useful in some situations
    (buggy driver, old driver missing a device ID, trying a workaround,
    etc.) where the user needs to load a different driver.
    
    However, this is also prone to user error, where a driver is mapped
    to a device it's not designed to drive. For example, if the ice driver
    is mapped to driver iavf devices, the ice driver crashes.
    
    Add a check to return an error if the ice driver is being used to
    probe a virtual function.

Decoding this.. There is actually an "iavf" driver, and it does have
special PCI IDs for VFs:

static const struct pci_device_id iavf_pci_tbl[] = {
        {PCI_VDEVICE(INTEL, IAVF_DEV_ID_VF), 0},
        {PCI_VDEVICE(INTEL, IAVF_DEV_ID_VF_HV), 0},
        {PCI_VDEVICE(INTEL, IAVF_DEV_ID_X722_VF), 0},
        {PCI_VDEVICE(INTEL, IAVF_DEV_ID_ADAPTIVE_VF), 0},

In normal cases iavf will probe to the SRIOV VFS just fine.

The above is saying if the user mis-uses driverctl to bind the ice
driver to a function that doesn't have matching PCI IDs then the
kernel crashes. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that is true for a lot of
drivers. Bind them to HW not in their ID tables and their are not
going to work right.

I would have rejected a patch like this. The ID table is already
correct and properly excludes VFs.

Jason