Re: [Qemu-devel] [v4][PATCH 2/5] xen, gfx passthrough: create intel isa bridge

[Stefano Stabellini]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2014, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Il 30/05/2014 10:59, Tiejun Chen ha scritto:
> > +static int create_pch_isa_bridge(PCIBus *bus, XenHostPCIDevice *hdev)
> > +{
> > +    struct PCIDevice *dev;
> > +
> > +    char rid;
> > +
> > +    dev = pci_create(bus, PCI_DEVFN(0x1f, 0), "intel-pch-isa-bridge");
> 
> This is really a huge hack.  You're going to have two ISA bridge devices in
> the machine, with the BIOS imagining that the "good" one is at 1f.0 and the
> ACPI tables actually describing the other one.  But the PCI device at 1f.0
> remains there and a driver in the OS could catch it---not just
> intel_detect_pch---and if you want to add such a hack it should be done in the
> Xen management layers.
> 
> If possible, the host bridge patches are even worse.  If you change the vendor
> and device ID while keeping the registers of the i440FX you're going to get
> conflicts or break firmware badly; TianoCore and SeaBIOS both expect the
> normal i440FX vendor and device IDs, for example.
> 
> The hardcoded list of offsets is also not acceptable.  It is also not clear
> who is accessing the registers, whether the BIOS or the driver. For Linux, a
> cursory look at the driver shows that it only accesses 0x50/0x52 of the listed
> offsets, but also 0x44/0x48 ("MCH BAR"), what happens if that code path is
> encountered?
> 
> The main problem with IGD passthrough is the incestuous (and that's a
> euphemism) relationship between the MCH, PCH and graphics driver.  It may make
> sense at the hardware level, but for virtualization it doesn't.  A
> virt-specific driver for GPU command passthrough (with aid from the kernel
> driver, but abstracting all the MCH/PCH-dependent details) would make much
> more sense.
> 
> It's really not your fault, there's not much you can do given the hardware
> architecture.  But I don't think this code can be accepted upstream, sorry.

Yeah, the code is not nice and it is not Tiejun's fault.

Is there any way at all he could change the patch series to make it more
appealing to you? Or maybe we could having more clearly separated from
the rest of the codebase?


Otherwise I hate to have to diverge again from upstream QEMU but given
that we were already carrying these changes in the old
qemu-xen-traditional tree without issues, I feel that it would be unfair
for me not to merge them in the upstream based qemu-xen tree.
Unfortunately I imagine that the lack of this feature could be
considered a regression for us.

Do the other Xen maintainters have any opinions on this? I would
appreciate your opinions.