On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 11:38:41AM +0530, Kishon Vijay Abraham I wrote: > > Ok, so in theory there can be other hardware (and quite likely is) > > that supports multiple functions, and we can extend the framework > > to support them without major obstacles, but your hardware doesn't, > > so you kept it simple with one hardcoded function, right? > > right, PCIe can have upto 8 functions. So the issues with the current framework > has to be fixed. I don't expect major obstacles with this as of now. I wouldn't be too worried about. We have two kinds of functions in PCIe: physical functions, or virtual functions using SR-IOV. For the first one we pretty much just need the controller driver to report them separately as there is almost no interaction between functions. SR-IOV support will be more interesting as the physical functions controls creation of the associated virtual functions. I'd like to defer that problem until we get hold of a software programmable controller that supports SR-IOV and has open documentation. (That beeing said, if someone has a pointer to such a beast send it my way!) > > We should still find out whether it's important that you can have > > a single PCI function with a software multi-function support of some > > sort. We'd still be limited to six BARs in total, and would also need > > something to identify those sub-functions, so implementing that might > > get quite hairy. > > > > Possibly this could be done at a higher level, e.g. by implementing > > a PCI-virtio multiplexer that can host multiple virtio based devices > > inside of a single PCI function. If we think that would be a good idea, > > we should make sure the configfs interface is extensible enough to > > handle that. > > Okay. So here the main function (actual PCI function) *can* perform the work of > virtio muliplexer if the platform wants to support sub-functions or it can be a > normal PCI function. right? I really don't think we should be worried about this multiplexer. It's not something real PCIe devices do (sane ones anyway, the rest is handled by ad-hoc multiplexers), and we should avoid creating our own magic periphals for it. > > One use case I have in mind for this is to have a PCI function that > > can use virtio to provide rootfs (virtio-blk or 9pfs), network > > and console to the system that implements the PCI function (note > > that this is the opposite direction of what almost everyone else > > uses PCI devices for). > > Do you mean the virtio should actually be in the host side? Even here the > system that implements PCI function should have multiple functions right? (one > for network, other for console etc..). So there should be a virtio multiplexer > both in the host side and in the device side? We already support virtio over phsysical PCIe buses to support intel MIC devices. Take a look at drivers/misc/mic/bus/vop_bus.c and drivers/misc/mic/vop (yes, what a horrible place for that code, not my fault) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
