On Wed, Mar 02, 2022 at 05:56:03PM +0200, Max Gurtovoy wrote:
> Hi,
> A virtio subsystem definition will help extending the virtio specefication for
> various future features that require a notion of grouping devices together or
> managing devices inside a group. It also might be used splitting or sharing a
> single virtio backend between multiple devices (e.g. Multipath IO for 
> virtio-blk
> devices). A virtio subsystem include one or more virtio devices.


A large patch, need a bit more time for review. Meanwhile,
how about adding migration related capabilities?
I would very much like that to make progress before
people start using high overhead solutions like
VQ shadowing.


> Also introduce the admin facility to allow manipulating features and 
> configurations
> in a generic manner. Using the admin command set, one can manipulate the 
> device itself
> and/or to manipulate, if possible, another device within the same virtio 
> subsystem (the
> following patch set).
> 
> The admin virtqueue is the first management interface to issue Admin commands 
> from
> the admin command set.
> 
> The admin virtqueue interface will be extended in the future with more and 
> more
> features that some of them already in discussions. Some of these features 
> don't
> fit to MMIO/config_space characteristics, therefore a queue is selected to 
> address
> admin commands.
> 
> Motivation for choosing admin queue:
> 1. It is anticipated that admin queue will be used for managing and 
> configuring
>    many different type of resources. For example,
>    a. PCI PF configuring PCI VF attributes.
>    b. virtio device creating/destroying/configuring subfunctions discussed in 
> [1]
>    c. composing device config space of VF or SF such as mac address, number 
> of VQs, virtio features
> 
>    Mapping all of them as configuration registers to MMIO will require large 
> MMIO space,
>    if done for each VF/SF. Such MMIO implementation in physical devices such 
> as PCI PF and VF
>    requires on-chip resources to complete within MMIO access latencies. Such 
> resources are very
>    expensive.
> 
> 2. Such limitation can be overcome by having smaller MMIO register set to 
> build
>    a command request response interface. However, such MMIO based command 
> interface
>    will be limited to serve single outstanding command execution. Such 
> limitation can
>    resulting in high device creation and composing time which can affect VM 
> startup time.
>    Often device can queue and service multiple commands in parallel, such 
> command interface
>    cannot use parallelism offered by the device.
> 
> 3. When a command wants to DMA data from one or more physical addresses, for 
> example in the future a
>    live migration command may need to fetch device state consist of config 
> space, tens of
>    VQs state, VLAN and MAC table, per VQ partial outstanding block IO list 
> database and more.
>    Packing one or more DMA addresses over new command interface will be 
> burden some and continue
>    to suffer single outstanding command execution latencies. Such limitation 
> is not good for time
>    sensitive live migration use cases.
> 
> 4. A virtio queue overcomes all the above limitations. It also supports DMA 
> and multiple outstanding
>    descriptors. Similar mechanism exist today for device specific 
> configuration - the control VQ.
> 
> [1] https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/virtio-comment/202108/msg00025.html
> 
> This series was extended and splitted from the V3 of the "VIRTIO: Provision 
> maximum MSI-X vectors for a VF".
> This series include the comments and fixes from V1-V3 of the initial patch 
> set from above.
> The following series introduce the management devices and MSI-X configuration 
> of virtio devices.
> 
> Open issues:
> 1. CCW and MMIO specification for admin_queue_index register
> 
> Max Gurtovoy (5):
>   virtio: Introduce virtio subsystem
>   Introduce Admin Command Set
>   Introduce DEVICE INFO Admin command
>   Add virtio Admin virtqueue
>   Add miscellaneous configuration structure for PCI
> 
>  admin.tex        | 177 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  conformance.tex  |   3 +
>  content.tex      |  33 ++++++++-
>  introduction.tex |  20 ++++++
>  4 files changed, 231 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 admin.tex
> 
> -- 
> 2.21.0


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