[RFC PATCH kernel 0/5] powerpc/P9/vfio: Pass through NVIDIA Tesla V100

[Alex Williamson]

On Fri, 8 Jun 2018 13:08:54 +1000
Alexey Kardashevskiy <aik at ozlabs.ru> wrote:

> On 8/6/18 8:15 am, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > On Fri, 08 Jun 2018 07:54:02 +1000
> > Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> >   
> >> On Thu, 2018-06-07 at 11:04 -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:  
> >>>
> >>> Can we back up and discuss whether the IOMMU grouping of NVLink
> >>> connected devices makes sense?  AIUI we have a PCI view of these
> >>> devices and from that perspective they're isolated.  That's the view of
> >>> the device used to generate the grouping.  However, not visible to us,
> >>> these devices are interconnected via NVLink.  What isolation properties
> >>> does NVLink provide given that its entire purpose for existing seems to
> >>> be to provide a high performance link for p2p between devices?    
> >>
> >> Not entire. On POWER chips, we also have an nvlink between the device
> >> and the CPU which is running significantly faster than PCIe.
> >>
> >> But yes, there are cross-links and those should probably be accounted
> >> for in the grouping.  
> > 
> > Then after we fix the grouping, can we just let the host driver manage
> > this coherent memory range and expose vGPUs to guests?  The use case of
> > assigning all 6 GPUs to one VM seems pretty limited.  (Might need to
> > convince NVIDIA to support more than a single vGPU per VM though)  
> 
> These are physical GPUs, not virtual sriov-alike things they are
> implementing as well elsewhere.

vGPUs as implemented on M- and P-series Teslas aren't SR-IOV like
either.  That's why we have mdev devices now to implement software
defined devices.  I don't have first hand experience with V-series, but
I would absolutely expect a PCIe-based Tesla V100 to support vGPU.

> My current understanding is that every P9 chip in that box has some NVLink2
> logic on it so each P9 is directly connected to 3 GPUs via PCIe and
> 2xNVLink2, and GPUs in that big group are interconnected by NVLink2 links
> as well.
> 
> From small bits of information I have it seems that a GPU can perfectly
> work alone and if the NVIDIA driver does not see these interconnects
> (because we do not pass the rest of the big 3xGPU group to this guest), it
> continues with a single GPU. There is an "nvidia-smi -r" big reset hammer
> which simply refuses to work until all 3 GPUs are passed so there is some
> distinction between passing 1 or 3 GPUs, and I am trying (as we speak) to
> get a confirmation from NVIDIA that it is ok to pass just a single GPU.
> 
> So we will either have 6 groups (one per GPU) or 2 groups (one per
> interconnected group).

I'm not gaining much confidence that we can rely on isolation between
NVLink connected GPUs, it sounds like you're simply expecting that
proprietary code from NVIDIA on a proprietary interconnect from NVIDIA
is going to play nice and nobody will figure out how to do bad things
because... obfuscation?  Thanks,

Alex