Re: assigning PCI addresses with bus > 0x09

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On 12/20/18 9:20 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 03:15:34PM +0100, Riccardo Ravaioli wrote:
Hi,

My goal is to assign PCI addresses to a number of devices (network
interfaces, disks and PCI devices in PCI-passthrough) without delegating to
libvirt the generation of those values. This should give me more control
and for sure more predictability over the hardware configuration of a
virtual machine and consequently the name of the interfaces in it.  I'm
using libvirt 4.3.0 to create qemu/KVM virtual machines running Linux
(Debian Stretch).

So, for every device of the type mentioned above, I add this line:
<address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x__' slot='0x__' function='0x0'/>,
... with values from 00 to ff in the bus field, and from 00 to 1f in the
slot field, as described in the documentation.

Long story short, I noticed that as soon as I assign values > 0x09 to the
bus field, the serial console hangs indefinitely, in both Debian and
Ubuntu. The VM seems to be started correctly and its state is "running"; in
the XML file created by libvirt, I see all controllers from 0 the largest
bus value I assigned, so everything from that side seems ok.

I guess the hang is that you hit some limit in PCI buses.

I think you're right. Each bus requires some amount of IO space, and I thought I recalled someone saying that all of the available IO space is exhausted after 7 or 8 buses. This was in relation to PCIe, where each root port is a bus, and can potentially take up IO space, so possibly in that context they were talking about the buses *after* the root bus and pcie-pci-bridge, which would bring us back to the same number you're getting.

For PCIe our solution was to turn off IO space usage on the pcie-root-ports, but you can't do that for conventional PCI buses, since the devices might actually need IO space to function properly and the standard requires that you provide it.



The real question though is why you need to create sooooo many PCI buses.
Each bus can do 31 devices.  Do you really need to have more than 279
devices in your VM ?

And if you do need more than 279 devices, do they all need to be hot-pluggable? If not, then you can put up to 8 devices on each slot (functions 0 - 7).


Regards,
Daniel


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