Re: [Qemu-arm] [RESEND RFC 0/6] AMD XGBE KVM platform passthrough

[Eric Auger]

Hi Alex,
On 11/20/2015 12:44 AM, Alex Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-11-19 at 15:22 +0000, Eric Auger wrote:
>> I am resending this RFC from Oct 12, after kernel 4.4-rc1 and
>> QEMU 2.5-rc1, hoping things have calmed down a little bit.
>>
>> This RFC allows to set up AMD XGBE passthrough. This was tested on AMD
>> Seattle.
>>
>> The first upstreamed device supporting KVM platform passthrough was the
>> Calxeda Midway XGMAC. Compared to this latter, the XGBE XGMAC exposes a
>> much more complex device tree node. Generating the device tree node for
>> the guest is the challenging and controversary part of this series.
>>
>> - First There are 2 device tree node formats:
>> one where XGBE and PHY are described in separate nodes and another one
>> that combines both description in a single node (only supported by 4.2
>> onwards kernels). Only the combined description is supported for passthrough,
>> meaning the host must be >= 4.2 and must feature a device tree with a 
>> combined
>> description. The guest will also be exposed with a combined description,
>> meaning only >= 4.2 guest are supported. It is not planned to support
>> separate node representation since assignment of the PHY is less
>> straigtforward.
>>
>> - the XGMAC/PHY node depends on 2 clock nodes (DMA and PTP).
>> The code checks those clocks are fixed to make sure they cannot be
>> switched off at some point after the native driver gets unbound.
>>
>> - there are many property values to populate on guest side. Most of them
>> cannot be hardcoded. That series proposes a way to parse the host device
>> tree blob and retrieve host values to feed guest representation. Current
>> approach relies on dtc binary availability plus libfdt usage.
>> Other alternatives were discussed in:
>> http://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm-arm/msg16648.html.
>>
>> - Currently host booted with ACPI is not supported.
> 
> I won't pretend to know all the politics in the ARM space, but doesn't
> this last bullet sort of imply that this is dead-on-arrival code?  Maybe
> not in the embedded space, but certainly in the server space, I thought
> ACPI was declared the winner.  Thanks,

When the code was written, no ACPI description was available yet
including IOMMU. Now I think there is a specification that would enable
the description of the system (IORT/DSDT tables) and I will investigate
whether we have one ready for the HW I am using and mainlined.

Nethertheless we had a discussion end of Sept with Marc Zyngier,
Christoffer, Will Deacon and other people working in the ARM ecosystem
and we decided starting with FDT host description was a reasonable
choice at this moment. To be fully honest Peter also thought we should
consider the ACPI case from day 0. But I think nobody -AFAIK - has an
ideal solution about how to address ACPI/DT in a unified way and people
seem to be against introducing IOCTL API.

Among solutions I foresee the 1st one below was considered the simplest
and chosen:
1) rely on external applications to decode/parse dt/ACPI table
2) build a unified fs representation for dt/ACPI
3) create unified IOCTL API to retrieve dt/ACPI info (attempted by VOSYS
but at VFIO level)

The idea of this series is
- to rely on external dtc binary to build the blob from
/sys/firmware/devicetree/base
- introduce some helpers using libfdt that manipulate the host dt blob
- use those helpers in sysbus-fdt.c to build the clock and xgbe nodes
for the guest

Assuming we have an ACPI description I guess we would/could use a
similar approach to parse/decode the ACPI table from QEMU (relying on
acpidump, acpixtract, iasl, ../.. combination). So the current proposal
brings a solution for embedded world and can be easily reused for other
devices. Next step is to propose a similar approach for ACPI. Now I
would like to make sure the open approach is accepted (with external
dependency on dtc binary as we would have ext dependency on ACPI utilities).

Best Regards

Eric


> 
> Alex
>