kvm PCI assignment & VFIO ramblings

[Roedel, Joerg]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 01:08:29PM -0400, Alex Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-08-23 at 15:14 +0200, Roedel, Joerg wrote:

> > Handling it through fds is a good idea. This makes sure that everything
> > belongs to one process. I am not really sure yet if we go the way to
> > just bind plain groups together or if we create meta-groups. The
> > meta-groups thing seems somewhat cleaner, though.
> 
> I'm leaning towards binding because we need to make it dynamic, but I
> don't really have a good picture of the lifecycle of a meta-group.

In my view the life-cycle of the meta-group is a subrange of the
qemu-instance's life-cycle.

> > Putting the process to sleep (which would be uninterruptible) seems bad.
> > The process would sleep until the guest releases the device-group, which
> > can take days or months.
> > The best thing (and the most intrusive :-) ) is to change PCI core to
> > allow unbindings to fail, I think. But this probably further complicates
> > the way to upstream VFIO...
> 
> Yes, it's not ideal but I think it's sufficient for now and if we later
> get support for returning an error from release, we can set a timeout
> after notifying the user to make use of that.  Thanks,

Ben had the idea of just forcing to hard-unplug this device from the
guest. Thats probably the best way to deal with that, I think. VFIO
sends a notification to qemu that the device is gone and qemu informs
the guest in some way about it.

	Joerg

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