Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/4] add failover feature for assigned network devices

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Mon, Jun 03, 2019 at 02:06:47PM -0400, Laine Stump wrote:
> On 5/28/19 10:54 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 05:14:22PM -0700, si-wei liu wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > On 5/21/2019 11:49 AM, Jens Freimann wrote:
> > > > On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 07:37:19AM -0400, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 09:21:57AM +0200, Jens Freimann wrote:
> > > > > > On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 04:56:57PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> 
> > > > > Actually is there a list of devices for which this has been tested
> > > > > besides mlx5? I think someone said some old intel cards
> > > > > don't support this well, we might need to blacklist these ...
> > > > 
> > > > So far I've tested mlx5 and XL710 which both worked, but I'm
> > > > working on testing with more devices. But of course help with testing
> > > > is greatly appreciated.
> >>
> > > It won't work on Intel ixgbe and Broadcom bnxt_en, which requires toggling
> > > the state of tap backing the virtio-net in order to release/reprogram MAC
> > > filter. Actually, it's very few NICs that could work with this - even some
> > > works by chance the behavior is undefined. Instead of blacklisting it 
> > > makes
> > > more sense to whitelist the NIC that supports it - with some new sysfs
> > > attribute claiming the support presumably.
> > > 
> > > -Siwei
> > 
> > I agree for many cards we won't know how they behave until we try.  One
> > can consider this a bug in Linux that cards don't behave in a consistent
> > way.  The best thing to do IMHO would be to write a tool that people can
> > run to test the behaviour.
> 
> Is the "bad behavior" something due to the hardware of the cards, or their
> drivers? If it's the latter, then at least initially having a whitelist
> would be counterproductive, since it would make it difficult for relative
> outsiders to test and report success/failure of various cards.

We can add an "ignore whitelist" flag. Would that address the issue?

> (It's probably just a pipe dream, but it would be nice if it eventually
> could work with old igb cards - I have several of them that I use for SRIOV
> testing, and would rather avoid having to buy new hardware.)

I think it generally can be worked around in the driver.
Most host drivers do get a notification when guest driver
loads/unloads and can use that to manipulate the on-device
switch.

-- 
MST