On Wed, Aug 5, 2026 at 10:40 PM Liu, Changcheng <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 05, 2026 at 01:45:58PM -0400, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Aug 1, 2026 at 2:21 AM Liu, Changcheng <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > > When creating many virtio-blk devices, probe starts failing with
> > > -ENOSPC (-28) because the system runs out of interrupt vectors:
> > >
> > >   virtio_blk virtioNNN: probe with driver virtio_blk failed with error -28
> > >
> > > By default virtio-blk uses managed IRQ affinity, which reserves an
> > > interrupt vector on every CPU for each device (about nr_cpus vectors per
> > > device). On a host with many CPUs and many devices this exhausts the
> > > vectors long before all devices are probed.
> > >
> > > Add use_irq_affinity (default true, no behaviour change). Set it to 0 to
> > > use unmanaged interrupts, so each device only uses a couple of vectors
> > > instead of one per CPU, allowing far more devices to probe.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Liu, Changcheng <[email protected]>
> >
> > There is already a num_request_queues module parameter for cases where
> > the user wishes to reduce the number of virtqueues. Did you benchmark
> > that and decide the performance of many queues sharing a single irq
> > makes it worth adding another module parameter?
> >
> > Stefan
>
> num_request_queues does not address this case because each virtio-blk device
> already has only one request virtqueue when the failure occurs, so the queue
> count cannot be reduced further.

Okay.

> The issue is reproduced after probing approximately 800 virtio-blk devices on
> a 64-core bare-metal host. With managed IRQ affinity, the IRQ-vector 
> reservations
> are eventually exhausted and probing additional devices fails with -ENOSPC.
> Disabling managed IRQ affinity avoids these per-CPU vector reservations and
> allows more devices to be probed successfully.

I don't follow. My understanding was that non-managed IRQ vectors are
allocated by request_irq(), which is called during virtio_find_vqs().
Probing 800 devices would still require 800 * (1 virtqueue irq + 1
config change irq) = 1,600 vectors. How come non-managed IRQs do not
hit the limit here?

Thanks,
Stefan

> This patch does not cause multiple virtqueues to share a single IRQ. Passing a
> NULL affinity descriptor only disables managed IRQ affinity. Regardless of the
> number of virtqueues, virtio-pci still first attempts to allocate a separate
> interrupt vector for each interrupt-driven virtqueue. Only if per-VQ vector
> allocation fails does the existing virtio-pci fallback share a vector among
> the virtqueues, and that fallback is independent of this patch.
>
> The new parameter defaults to enabled, so the existing driver behavior remains
> unchanged unless the option is explicitly disabled. The option is intended for
> environments with a very large number of devices, particularly for functional
> device testing.
>
> - Changcheng
>
> >
> > > diff --git a/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c b/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c
> > > index 32bf3ba07a9d..184f1c1f4485 100644
> > > --- a/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c
> > > +++ b/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c
> > > @@ -41,6 +41,11 @@ static unsigned int poll_queues;
> > >  module_param(poll_queues, uint, 0644);
> > >  MODULE_PARM_DESC(poll_queues, "The number of dedicated virtqueues for 
> > > polling I/O");
> > >
> > > +static bool use_irq_affinity = true;
> > > +module_param(use_irq_affinity, bool, 0644);
> > > +MODULE_PARM_DESC(use_irq_affinity,
> > > +                "Use managed IRQ affinity for virtqueues (default: 
> > > true)");
> > > +
> > >  static int major;
> > >  static DEFINE_IDA(vd_index_ida);
> > >
> > > @@ -1016,7 +1021,8 @@ static int init_vq(struct virtio_blk *vblk)
> > >         }
> > >
> > >         /* Discover virtqueues and write information to configuration.  */
> > > -       err = virtio_find_vqs(vdev, num_vqs, vqs, vqs_info, &desc);
> > > +       err = virtio_find_vqs(vdev, num_vqs, vqs, vqs_info,
> > > +                             use_irq_affinity ? &desc : NULL);
> > >         if (err)
> > >                 goto out;
> > >
> > > --
> > > 2.43.7
> > >
> > >

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