Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Memory API

[Avi Kivity]

On 05/18/2011 07:00 PM, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> On 2011-05-18 17:42, Avi Kivity wrote:
> >  On 05/18/2011 06:36 PM, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> >>>
> >>>   We need to head for the more hardware-like approach.  What happens when
> >>>   you program overlapping BARs?  I imagine the result is
> >>>   implementation-defined, but ends up with one region decoded in
> >>>   preference to the other.  There is simply no way to reject an
> >>>   overlapping mapping.
> >>
> >>  But there is also now simple way to allow them. At least not without
> >>  exposing control about their ordering AND allowing to hook up managing
> >>  code (e.g. of the PCI bridge or the chipset) that controls registrations.
> >
> >  What about memory_region_add_subregion(..., int priority) as I suggested
> >  in another message?
>
> That's fine, but also requires a change how, or better where devices
> register their regions.

Lost you - please elaborate.

> >
> >  Regarding bridges, every registration request flows through them so they
> >  already have full control.
>
> Not everything is PCI, we also have ISA e.g. If we were able to route
> such requests also through a hierarchy of abstract bridges, then even
> better.

Yes, it's a tree of nested MemoryRegions.

> >  We'll definitely have a flattened view (phys_desc is such a flattened
> >  view, hopefully we'll have a better one).
>
> phys_desc is not exportable. If we try (and we do from time to time...),
> we end up with more slots than clients like kvm will ever be able to handle.

If we coalesce ajacent phys_descs we end up with a minimal 
representation.  Of course that's not the most efficient implementation 
(a tree walk is better).

> >
> >  We can basically run a tree walk on each change, emitting ranges in
> >  order and sending them to PhysMemClients.
>
> I'm specifically thinking of fully trackable slot updates. The clients
> should not have to maintain the flat layout. They should just receive
> updates in the form of slot X added/modified/removed. For now, this
> magic happens multiple times in the clients, and that is very bad.

Slots don't have any meaning.  You can have a RAM region which is 
overlaid by a smaller mmio region -> the RAM slot is split into two.

We should just send clients a list of ranges, and they can associate 
them with slots themselves.

> Given that not only memory clients need that view but that ever TLB miss
> (in TCG mode) requires to identify the effective slot as well, it might
> be worth preparing a runtime structure at registration time that
> supports this efficiently - but this time without wasting memory.

Yes.  Won't be easy though.  Perhaps a perfect hash table for small 
regions and a sorted-by-size array for large regions.

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