[PATCH RFC] virtio-pci: new config layout: using memory BAR

Michael S. Tsirkin
Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:14:05 -0000

On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 03:42:57PM -0500, Anthony Liguori
wrote:
> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst at redhat.com> writes:
>
> > On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 01:57:16PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst at redhat.com> writes:
> >>
> >> > On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 10:46:15AM -0500, Anthony Liguori
wrote:
> >> >> Look, it's very simple.
> >> > We only need to do it if we do a change that breaks guests.
> >> >
> >> > Please find a guest that is broken by the patches. You
won't find any.
> >>
> >> I think the problem in this whole discussion is that we're
talking past
> >> each other.
> >>
> >> Here is my understanding:
> >>
> >> 1) PCI-e says that you must be able to disable IO bars and still
have a
> >> functioning device.
> >>
> >> 2) It says (1) because you must size IO bars to 4096 which means
that
> >> practically speaking, once you enable a dozen or so PIO bars, you
run
> >> out of PIO space (16 * 4k == 64k and not all that space can be
used).
> >
> >
> > Let me add 3 other issues which I mentioned and you seem to miss:
> >
> > 3) architectures which don't have fast access to IO ports, exist
> >    virtio does not work there ATM
>
> Which architectures have PCI but no IO ports?
>
> > 4) setups with many PCI bridges exist and have the same issue
> >    as PCI express. virtio does not work there ATM
>
> This is not virtio specific.  This is true for all devices that use IO.

Absolutely. And you will find that modern devices make use of IO
ports optional.

> > 5) On x86, even with nested page tables, firmware only decodes
> >    the page address on an invalid PTE, not the data. You need to
> >    emulate the guest to get at the data. Without
> >    nested page tables, we have to do page table walk and emulate
> >    to get both address and data. Since this is how MMIO
> >    is implemented in kvm on x86, MMIO is much slower than PIO
> >    (with nested page tables by a factor of >2, did not test
without).
>
> Am well aware of this, this is why we use PIO.
>
> I fully agree with you that when we do MMIO, we should switch the
> notification mechanism to avoid encoding anything meaningful as data.
>
> >> virtio-pci uses a IO bars exclusively today.  Existing guest
drivers
> >> assume that there is an IO bar that contains the virtio-pci
registers.
> >> So let's consider the following scenarios:
> >>
> >> QEMU of today:
> >>
> >> 1) qemu -drive file=ubuntu-13.04.img,if=virtio
> >>
> >> This works today.  Does adding an MMIO bar at BAR1 break this?
> >> Certainly not if the device is behind a PCI bus...
> >>
> >> But are we going to put devices behind a PCI-e bus by default?
Are we
> >> going to ask the user to choose whether devices are put behind a
legacy
> >> bus or the express bus?
> >>
> >> What happens if we put the device behind a PCI-e bus by default?
Well,
> >> it can still work.  That is, until we do something like this:
> >>
> >> 2) qemu -drive file=ubuntu-13.04.img,if=virtio -device virtio-rng
> >>         -device virtio-balloon..
> >>
> >> Such that we have more than a dozen or so devices.  This works
> >> perfectly fine today.  It works fine because we've designed
virtio to
> >> make sure it works fine.  Quoting the spec:
> >>
> >> "Configuration space is generally used for rarely-changing or
> >>  initialization-time parameters. But it is a limited resource, so
it
> >>  might be better to use a virtqueue to update configuration
information
> >>  (the network device does this for filtering, otherwise the table
in the
> >>  config space could potentially be very large)."
> >>
> >> In fact, we can have 100s of PCI devices today without running out
of IO
> >> space because we're so careful about this.
> >>
> >> So if we switch to using PCI-e by default *and* we keep virtio-pci
> >> without modifying the device IDs, then very frequently we are
going to
> >> break existing guests because the drivers they already have no
longer
> >> work.
> >>
> >> A few virtio-serial channels, a few block devices, a couple of
network
> >> adapters, the balloon and RNG driver, and we hit the IO space
limit
> >> pretty damn quickly so this is not a contrived scenario at all.  I
would
> >> expect that we frequently run into this if we don't address
this problem.
> >>
> >> So we have a few options:
> >> 1) Punt all of this complexity to libvirt et al and watch people
make
> >>    the wrong decisions about when to use PCI-e.  This will become
yet
> >>    another example of KVM being too hard to configure.
> >>
> >> 2) Enable PCI-e by default and just force people to upgrade their
> >>    drivers.
> >>
> >> 3) Don't use PCI-e by default but still add BAR1 to virtio-pci
> >>
> >> 4) Do virtio-pcie, make it PCI-e friendly (drop the IO BAR
completely),
> >
> > We can't do this - it will hurt performance.
>
> Can you explain?  I thought the whole trick with separating out the
> virtqueue notification register was to regain the performance?

Yes but this trick only works well with NPT (it's still a bit
slower than PIO but not so drastically).
Without NPT you still need a page walk so it will be slow.

> >>    give
> >>    it a new device/vendor ID.   Continue to use virtio-pci for
existing
> >>    devices potentially adding virtio-{net,blk,...}-pcie variants
for
> >>    people that care to use them.
> >>
> >> I think 1 == 2 == 3 and I view 2 as an ABI breaker.
> >
> > Why do you think 2 == 3? 2 changes default behaviour. 3 does not.
>
> It doesn't change the default behavior but then we're pushing the
> decision of when to use pci-e to the user.  They have to understand that
> there can be subtle breakages because the virtio-pci driver may not work
> if they are using an old guest.

pci-e is a separate issue. E.g. we can make pci-e a new device id.

> >> libvirt does like
> >> policy so they're going to make a simple decision and always
use the
> >> same bus by default.  I suspect if we made PCI the default, they
might
> >> just always set the PCI-e flag just because.
> >
> > This sounds very strange. But let's assume you are right for
> > the sake of the argument ...
> >
> >> There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of guests with
existing
> >> virtio-pci drivers.  Forcing them to upgrade better have an
extremely
> >> good justification.
> >>
> >> I think 4 is the best path forward.  It's better for users
(guests
> >> continue to work as they always have).  There's less confusion
about
> >> enabling PCI-e support--you must ask for the virtio-pcie variant
and you
> >> must have a virtio-pcie driver.  It's easy to explain.
> >
> > I don't think how this changes the situation. libvirt still need
> > to set policy and decide which device to use.
>
> But virtio-pcie never exhausts the IO configuration space.  That's the
> difference.
>
> And virtio-pcie is a separate driver so presumably libvirt will make
> that visible in the XML.  In fact, it should.

It should already do that explicit even if device name
is the same. In fact, it does: bus name is pcie.0 versus
pci.0

> >> It also maps to what regular hardware does.  I highly doubt that
there
> >> are any real PCI cards that made the shift from PCI to PCI-e
without
> >> bumping at least a revision ID.
> >
> > Only because the chance it's 100% compatible on the software level
is 0.
> > It always has some hardware specific quirks.
> > No such excuse here.
> >
> >> It also means we don't need to play games about sometimes
enabling IO
> >> bars and sometimes not.
> >
> > This last paragraph is wrong, it ignores the issues 3) to 5)
> > I added above.
> >
> > If you do take them into account:
> > 	- there are reasons to add MMIO BAR to PCI,
> > 	  even without PCI express
>
> So far, the only reason you've provided is "it doesn't work on
some
> architectures."  Which architectures?

PowerPC wants this.

> > 	- we won't be able to drop IO BAR from virtio
>
> An IO BAR is useless if it means we can't have more than 12 devices.


It's not useless. A smart BIOS can enable devices one by one as
it tries to boot from them.

> >
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Anthony Liguori
> >>
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > --
> >> > MST
> >> > --
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