On 09/01/2016 04:49 PM, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
Hi
On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 12:19 PM Wei Wang <wei.w.w...@intel.com
<mailto:wei.w.w...@intel.com>> wrote:
On 08/31/2016 08:30 PM, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
- If it could be made not pci-specific, a better name for the
device could be simply "driver": the driver of a virtio device.
Or the "slave" in vhost-user terminology - consumer of virtq. I
think you prefer to call it "backend" in general, but I find it
more confusing.
Not really. A virtio device has it own driver (e.g. a virtio-net
driver for a virtio-net device). A vhost-pci device plays the role
of a backend (just like vhost_net, vhost_user) for a virtio
device. If we use the "device/driver" naming convention, the
vhost-pci device is part of the "device". But I actually prefer to
use "frontend/backend" :) If we check the QEMU's
doc/specs/vhost-user.txt, it also uses "backend" to describe.
Yes, but it uses "backend" freely without any definition and to name
eventually different things. (at least "slave" is being defined as the
consumer of virtq, but I think some people don't like to use that word).
I think most people know the concept of backend/frontend, that's
probably the reason why they usually don't explicitly explain it in a
doc. If you guys don't have an objection, I suggest to use it in the
discussion :) The goal here is to get the design finalized first. When
it comes to the final spec wording phase, we can decide which
description is more proper.
Have you thought about making the device not pci specific? I don't
know much about mmio devices nor s/390, but if devices can hotplug
their own memory (I believe mmio can), then it should be possible to
define a device generic enough.
Not yet. I think the main difference would be the way to map the
frontend VM's memory (in our case, we use a BAR). Other things should be
generic.
- Why is it required or beneficial to support multiple "frontend"
devices over the same "vhost-pci" device? It could simplify
things if it was a single device. If necessary, that could also
be interesting as a vhost-user extension.
We call it "multiple backend functionalities" (e.g. vhost-pci-net,
vhost-pci-scsi..). A vhost-pci driver contains multiple such
backend functionalities, because in this way they can reuse
(share) the same memory mapping. To be more precise, a vhost-pci
device supplies the memory of a frontend VM, and all the backend
functionalities need to access the same frontend VM memory, so we
consolidate them into one vhost-pci driver to use one vhost-pci
device.
That's what I imagined. Do you have a use case for that?
Currently, we only have the network use cases. I think we can design it
that way (multple backend functionalities), which is more generic (not
just limited to network usages). When implementing it, we can first have
the network backend functionality (i.e. vhost-pci-net) implemented. In
the future, if people are interested in other backend functionalities, I
think it should be easy to add them.
Given that it's in a VM (no caching issues?), how is it a problem to
map the same memory multiple times? Is there a memory limit?
I need to explain this a little bit more :) - the backend VM doesn't
need to map the same memory multiple times. It maps the entire memory of
a frontend VM using a vhost-pci device (it's a one-time mapping
happening at the setup phase). Those backend functionalities reside in
the same vhost-pci driver, so the bar is ioremap()-ed only once, by the
vhost-pci driver. The backend functionalities are not created together
in the driver probe() function. A backend functionality is created when
the vhost-pci driver receives a controlq message asking for creating one
(the message indicates the type - net, scsi, console etc.).
I haven't seen any caching issues so far.
IIRC, the memory mapping has a limit (512GB or 1T), but that should be
enough (a guest usually has a much smaller memory size).
- no interrupt support, I suppose you mainly looked at poll-based
net devices
Yes. But I think it's also possible to add the interrupt support.
For example, we can use ioeventfd (or hypercall) to inject
interrupts to the fontend VM after transmitting packets.
I guess it would be a good idea to have this in the spec from the
beginning, not as an afterthought
OK, will add it.
Best,
Wei
