Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH 0/3] x86: Add support for guest DMA dirty page tracking

[Alexander Duyck]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2016 at 8:03 PM, Zhou Jie <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi, Alex
>
>
> On 2016/6/9 23:39, Alexander Duyck wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 3:14 AM, Zhou Jie <address@hidden>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> TO Alex
>>> TO Michael
>>>
>>>    In your solution you add a emulate PCI bridge to act as
>>>    a bridge between direct assigned devices and the host bridge.
>>>    Do you mean put all direct assigned devices to
>>>    one emulate PCI bridge?
>>>    If yes, this maybe bring some problems.
>>>
>>>    We are writing a patchset to support aer feature in qemu.
>>>    When assigning a vfio device with AER enabled, we must check whether
>>>    the device supports a host bus reset (ie. hot reset) as this may be
>>>    used by the guest OS in order to recover the device from an AER
>>>    error.
>>>    QEMU must therefore have the ability to perform a physical
>>>    host bus reset using the existing vfio APIs in response to a virtual
>>>    bus reset in the VM.
>>>    A physical bus reset affects all of the devices on the host bus.
>>>    Therefore all physical devices affected by a bus reset must be
>>>    configured on the same virtual bus in the VM.
>>>    And no devices unaffected by the bus reset,
>>>    be configured on the same virtual bus.
>>>
>>>    http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-05/msg02989.html
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>> Zhou Jie
>>
>>
>> That makes sense, but I don't think you have to worry much about this
>> at this point at least on my side as this was mostly just theory and I
>> haven't had a chance to put any of it into practice as of yet.
>>
>> My idea has been evolving on this for a while.  One thought I had is
>> that we may want to have something like an emulated IOMMU and if
>> possible we would want to split it up over multiple domains just so we
>> can be certain that the virtual interfaces and the physical ones
>> existed in separate domains.  In regards to your concerns perhaps what
>> we could do is put each assigned device into its own domain to prevent
>> them from affecting each other.  To that end we could probably break
>> things up so that each device effectively lives in its own PCIe slot
>> in the emulated system.  Then when we start a migration of the guest
>> the assigned device domains would then have to be tracked for unmap
>> and sync calls when the direction is from the device.
>>
>> I will keep your concerns in mind in the future when I get some time
>> to look at exploring this solution further.
>>
>> - Alex
>
>
> I am thinking about the practice of migration of passthrough device.
>
> In your solution, you use a vendor specific configuration space to
> negotiate with guest.
> If you put each assigned device into its own domain,
> how can qemu negotiate with guest?
> Add the vendor specific configuration space to every pci bus which
> is assigned a passthrough device?

This is kind of the direction I was thinking of heading in, so yes.
Basically in my mind we should be emulating a PCIe hierarchy if we
want so support device assignment.  That way we can already make use
of things like hot-plug and AER natively.  So if we have a root port
assigned to each assigned device we should be able to place some extra
logic there to handle things like this.

- Alex