Re: [Qemu-ppc] [PATCH v2 02/19] spapr: introduce a skeleton for the XIVE interrupt controller

[David Gibson]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 11:12:06AM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-12-20 at 16:09 +1100, David Gibson wrote:
> > 
> > As you've suggested in yourself, I think we might need to more
> > explicitly model the different components of the XIVE system.  As part
> > of that, I think you need to be clearer in this base skeleton about
> > exactly what component your XIVE object represents.
> > 
> > If the answer is "the overall thing" I suspect that's not what you
> > want - I had one of those for XICs which proved to be a mistake
> > (eventually replaced by the XICSFabric interface).
> > 
> > Changing the model later isn't impossible, but doing so without
> > breaking migration can be a real pain, so I think it's worth a
> > reasonable effort to try and get it right initially.
> 
> Note: we do need to speed things up a bit, as having exploitation mode
> in KVM will significantly help with IPI performance among other things.
> 
> I'm about ready to do the KVM bits. The one thing we need to discuss
> and figure a good design for is how we map all those interrupt control
> pages into qemu.
> 
> Each interrupt (either PCIe pass-through or the "generic XIVE IPIs"
> which are used for guest IPIs and for vio/virtio/emulated interrupts)
> comes with a "control page" (ESB page) which needs to be mapped into
> the guest, and the generic IPIs also come with a trigger page which
> needs to be mapped into the guest for guest IPIs or OpenCAPI
> interrupts, or just qemu for emulated devices.
> 
> Now that can be thousands of these critters. I certainly don't want to
> create thousands of VMAs in qemu and even less thousands of memory
> regions in KVM.
> 
> So we need some kind of mechanism by wich a single large VMA gets
> mmap'ed into qemu (or maybe a couple of these, but not too many) and
> the interrupt pages can be assigned to slots in there and demand
> faulted.

Ok, I see your point.  We'll definitely need to be able to map things
in as a block, rather than one by one.

> For the generic interrupts, this can probably be covered by KVM, adding
> some arch ioctls for allocating IPIs and mmap'ing that region etc...
> 
> For pass-through, it's trickier, we don't want to mmap each irqfd
> individually for the above reason, so we want to "link" them to KVM. We
> don't want to allow qemu to take control of any arbitrary interrupt in
> the system though, so it has to related to the ownership of the irqfd
> coming from vfio.
> 
> OpenCAPI I suspect will be its own can of worms...
> 
> Also, have we decided how the process of switching between XICS and
> XIVE will work vs. CAS ? And how that will interact with KVM ? I was
> thinking the kernel would implement a different KVM device type, ie
> the "emulated XICS" would remain KVM_DEV_TYPE_XICS and XIVE would be
> KVM_DEV_TYPE_XIVE.
> 

-- 
David Gibson                    | I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au  | minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
                                | _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson

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