On 4/25/19 10:14 AM, Mauricio Tavares wrote:
So I am reading through , and am wondering what is the difference between
<hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'>
<hostdev>
and
<interface type='hostdev' managed='yes'>
</interface>
if I am trying to give full access to a NIC? Which one exposes more of the card?
I also answered this on IRC, but just in case someone is looking through
the email archives and comes across this message:
There are a couple of differences between <hostdev> and <interface
type='hostdev'>:
1) <hostdev> will work with "many" different devices (as long as they
are a PCI endpoint device, and don't share an IOMMU group with other
devices that must remain in use by the host), but <interface
type='hostdev'> can only be used for a PCI device that is a Virtual
Function (VF) of an SR-IOV capable network card (if you're unsure
whether or not your device qualifies, then it almost definitely *doesn't*
2) In preparation for using VFIO device assignment to assign the device
to a guest, both types of device will be automatically unbound from
their host driver and bound to the vfio-pci driver *if "managed='yes'"
is set*. In addition, <interface type='hostdev'> will set the MAC
address (and optionally the vlan tag) on the VF device before assigning
it to the guest. This isn't done when you use <hostdev>, the result
being that your guest will end up with a network device that has a
random MAC address that is different each time it is started.
So if you are assigning VFs from an SR-IOV netcard, then you *really*
want to use <interface type='hostdev'>. For all other cases of PCI
device assignment (including netcards that aren't SR-IOV VFs), you
*must* use <hostdev>.
As for "managed='yes'" - if you are never using the device directly on
the host, it's highly recommended that you bind the device to the
vfio-pci driver during the host bootup, and set "managed='no'" in the
XML - probably 80% or more of the bugs we encounter with device
assignment happen when we're unbinding the device from the host net (or
whatever) driver, and binding it to vfio-pci or vice-versa - all sorts
of timing issues that are essentially out of our control.
On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 1:13 PM Mauricio Tavares <raubvo...@gmail.com> wrote:
When you pass a device in the pci chain (after virsh
nodedev-dettach'ing it from host) to the guest, how much is passed
without being emulated/abstracted?
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