Hi Joerg, On 23/01/2019 08:34, Joerg Roedel wrote: > Hi Jean-Philippe, > > thanks for all your hard work on this! > > On Tue, Jan 15, 2019 at 12:19:52PM +0000, Jean-Philippe Brucker wrote: >> Implement the virtio-iommu driver, following specification v0.9 [1]. > > To make progress on this I think the spec needs to be close to something > that can be included into the official virtio-specification. Have you > proposed the specification for inclusion there? I haven't yet. I did send a few drafts of the spec to the mailing list, using arbitrary version numbers (0.1 - 0.9), and received excellent feedback from Eric, Kevin, Ashok and others [2], but I hadn't formally asked for inclusion yet. Since I haven't made any major change to the interface in a while, I'll get on that. > This is because I can't merge a driver that might be incompatible to > future implementations because the specification needs to be changed on > its way to an official standard. Makes sense, though I think other virtio devices have been developed a little more organically: device and driver code got upstreamed first, and then the specification describing their interface got merged into the standard. For example I believe that code for crypto, input and GPU devices were upstreamed long before the specification was merged. Once an implementation is upstream, the interface is expected to be backward-compatible (all subsequent changes are introduced using feature bits). So I've been working with this process in mind, also described by Jens at KVM forum 2017 [3]: (1) Reserve a device ID, and get that merged into virtio (ID 23 for virtio-iommu was reserved last year) (2) Open-source an implementation (this driver and Eric's device) (3) Formalize and upstream the device specification But I get that some overlap between (2) and (3) would have been better. So far the spec document has been reviewed mainly from the IOMMU point of view, and might require more changes to be in line with the other virtio devices -- hopefully just wording changes. I'll kick off step (3), but I think the virtio folks are a bit busy with finalizing the 1.1 spec so I expect it to take a while. Thanks, Jean [2] RFC https://markmail.org/thread/l6b2rpc46nua4egs 0.4 https://markmail.org/thread/f5k37mab7tnrslin 0.5 https://markmail.org/thread/tz65oolu5do7hi6n 0.6 https://markmail.org/thread/dppbg6owzrx2km2n 0.7 https://markmail.org/thread/dgdy4hicswpakmsq [3] The future of virtio: riddles, myths and surprises https://www.linux-kvm.org/images/0/03/Virtio_fall_2017.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9cWwgYH97A > I had a short discussion with Michael S. Tsirkin about that and from > what I understood the spec needs to be proposed for inclusion on the > virtio-comment[1] mailing list and later the TC needs to vote on it. > Please work with Michael on this to get the specification official (or > at least pretty close to something that will be part of the official > virtio standard). > > Regards, > > Joerg > > [1] https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=virtio
