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Re: MSI proposal and work transfer...(was: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0 of 5

To: Sheng Yang <sheng@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: MSI proposal and work transfer...(was: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0 of 5] PV on HVM Xen)
From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:47:58 -0700
Cc: "xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Don Dutile <ddutile@xxxxxxxxxx>, Keir Fraser <keir.fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Zhang, Xiantao" <xiantao.zhang@xxxxxxxxx>, Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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On 03/21/2010 11:26 PM, Sheng Yang wrote:
On Saturday 20 March 2010 04:38:23 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
On 03/17/2010 06:30 PM, Sheng Yang wrote:
Xiantao has some interesting ideas for this.
Xiantao and I have discussed on this for a month... Basically we have got
two approaches now, but we can't reach an agreement... I would work on it
after current hybrid thing settled down. Of course, we want MSI support
benefit pv_ops dom0 as well as hybrid.
Xiantao's proposal of a new top-level MSI API for the kernel looks
pretty clean, and I think it has a reasonable chance of being accepted
upstream.

What's your proposal?
My proposal is to do these in the lower level compared to Xiantao's proposal,
because I don't think touch PCI subsystem is a good idea for upstream check
in.

We can take advantage of the fact that MSI data/address formating can be
defined by each architecture, and at the same time, trap the accessing in the
Xen, passthrough the most PCI configuration space accessing but intercepted
MSI data/address accessing, so that we can write the real data to the hardware
when guest try to write Xen specific MSI data/address format.

The hook position would be arch_setup_msi_irqs(), which would create the
vector and write the x86 LAPIC specific format to MSI data/address. By this
way, we can limit the impact inside x86 arch. We would write the information
contained evtchn/PIRQ in it, so that we can setup the mapping. And this same
point works for MSI and MSI-X, and S3 wouldn't be a issue if we trap the
accessing.

I would be interested in seeing what the patches look like for this.

But to be quite honest, it could well be easier to introduce a new nice, clean, self-contained and consistent API at the appropriate level of abstraction rather than trying to shoe-horn one into the arch/x86 layer. It sounds like your proposal may well save some general kernel code changes, but at the expense of being quite complex under the covers.

Another thing is, due to some other task assignment to me days ago, I am
afraid I have to stop my working on PV extension of HVM guest, as well as MSI
work which we considered as a part of PV interrupt delivery mechanism for
Hybrid. You know, it's really a hard decision to me, but I have no choice...

So I would like to transfer the current work to someone who interested in it.
The next step is somehow clear. We would have a PV clocksource for HVM, as
well as PIRQ mapped irqchip to speed up interrupt delivery.

Stefano, would you like help to take my work and continue it? I think no one
is more familiar with these discussion and code than you in the community. The
final target is still upstream Linux I hope...

That's unfortunate; things seem to have been progressing quite well, and I'd really like to get something ready to commit (and possibly upstream) soon. Stefano, will you be able to finish things off?

Thanks,
    J

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