On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 03:42:57PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 01:57:16PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> 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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