Hi Thomas, We are working on next generation MegaRAID product where requirement is- to allocate additional 16 MSI-x vectors in addition to number of MSI-x vectors megaraid_sas driver usually allocates. MegaRAID adapter supports 128 MSI-x vectors.
To explain the requirement and solution, consider that we have 2 socket system (each socket having 36 logical CPUs). Current driver will allocate total 72 MSI-x vectors by calling API- pci_alloc_irq_vectors(with flag- PCI_IRQ_AFFINITY). All 72 MSI-x vectors will have affinity across NUMA nodes and interrupts are affinity managed. If driver calls- pci_alloc_irq_vectors_affinity() with pre_vectors = 16 and, driver can allocate 16 + 72 MSI-x vectors. All pre_vectors (16) will be mapped to all available online CPUs but effective affinity of each vector is to CPU 0. Our requirement is to have pre_vectors 16 reply queues to be mapped to local NUMA node with effective CPU should be spread within local node cpu mask. Without changing kernel code, we can achieve this by driver calling pci_enable_msix_range() (requesting to allocate 16 + 72 MSI-x vectors) instead of pci_alloc_irq_vectors() API. If we use pci_enable_msix_range(), it also requires MSI-x to CPU affinity handled by driver and these interrupts will be non-managed. Question is- Is there any restriction or preference of using pci_alloc_irq_vectors{/_affinity} vs pci_enable_msix_range in low level driver? If driver uses non-managed interrupt, all cases are handled correctly through irqbalancer. Is there any plan in future to migrate to managed interrupts entirely or it is a choice based call for driver maintainers? Thanks, Sumit