Re: [Qemu-devel] [libvirt] clean/simple Q35 support in libvirt+QEMU for guest OSes that don't support virtio-1.0

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 12:35:11PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> On Fri, 2018-08-17 at 10:29 +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 06:20:29PM -0400, Laine Stump wrote:
> > > 5) Some guest OSes that we still want to support (and which would
> > > otherwise work okay on a Q35 virtual machine) have virtio drivers too
> > > old to support virtio-1.0 (CentOS6 and RHEL6 are examples of such OSes),
> > > but due to the chain of reasons listed above, the "standard" config for
> > > a Q35 guest generated by libvirt doesn't support virtio-0.9, hence
> > > doesn't support these guest OSes.
> > 
> > Note when talking about "support" you're really saying it from the
> > downstream vendor, specifically RHEL, POV. From upstream or Fedora POV
> > essentially all x86 OS ever made are in scope for running under QEMU
> > if suitable virtual hardware models have been provided. QEMU doesn't
> > maintain any whitelist of "supported" OS that differs from what is
> > technically capable of being run, in the way downstream vendors do.
> 
> Well, at least in the case of RHEL 6, "not supported" means that it
> will not boot at all on q35 with the default guest topology created
> by libvirt, so that's not really a downstream-only problem :)

I mean from an upstream POV we still support RHEL-6 fine in i440fx,
so there's no reason to particularly care about RHEL-6 with q35
upstream. It is only downstream decision to try to force it to
use q35, despite it not working right today.

> > > C) inside libvirt, the implementation of the "virtio-0.9" model is
> > > identical to "virtio", except that the VIR_PCI_CONNECT_TYPE flags for
> > > these devices contain VIR_PCI_CONNECT_TYPE_PCI rather than
> > > VIR_PCI_CONNECT_TYPE_PCIE, resulting in those devices being assigned to
> > > a legacy PCI slot, and thus they would be transitional mode by default.
> > 
> > For 'virtio-0.9' libvirt should set "disable-modern=yes" in QEMU args
> > 
> > For 'virtio-1.0' libvirt should set "disable-legacy=yes" in QEMU args
> 
> If we decide we want to explicitly spell out the options instead
> of relying on QEMU changing behavior based on the slot type, which
> is probably a good idea anyway, I think we should have
> 
>   virtio-0.9 => disable-legacy=no,disable-modern=no
>   virtio-1.0 => disable-legacy=yes,disable-modern=no
> 
> There's basically no reason to have a device legacy-only rather
> than transitional, and spelling out both options instead of only
> one of them just seems more robust.

>From a testing POV it is desirable to be able to have legacy-only.
There is also possibility that guest OS impl 1.0 in a buggy manner,
so forcing legacy only is desirable.

The existing device still already provides a transitional option
on i440fx, and on Q35 if you do explicit placement in a PCI slot.
So I don't think there's a good reason to have a second transitional
device type, especially if we're naming it virtio-0.9, it is rather
misleading if it would be in fact able to run virtio-1.0 mode.


Regards,
Daniel
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