Re: [Qemu-ppc] [RFC PATCH 04/26] ppc/xive: introduce a skeleton for the XIVE interrupt controller model

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Wed, 2017-07-19 at 14:01 +1000, David Gibson wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 01:56:57PM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > On Wed, 2017-07-19 at 13:08 +1000, David Gibson wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 07:13:17PM +0200, Cédric Le Goater wrote:
> > > > Let's provide an empty shell for the XIVE controller model with a
> > > > couple of attributes for the IRQ number allocator. The latter is
> > > > largely inspired by OPAL which allocates IPI IRQ numbers from the
> > > > bottom of the IRQ number space and allocates the HW IRQ numbers from
> > > > the top.
> > > > 
> > > > The number of IPIs is simply deduced from the max number of CPUs the
> > > > guest supports and we provision a arbitrary number of HW irqs.
> > > > 
> > > > The XIVE object is kept private because it will hold internal tables
> > > > which do not need to be exposed to sPAPR.
> > 
> > It does have an MMIO presence though... more than one even. There's the
> > TIMA (per-HW thread control area) and there's the per-interrupt MMIO
> > space which are exposed to the guest. There's also the per-queue
> > MMIO control area too.
> 
> Ok.  Always?  Or just on powernv?
> 
> If it only has an MMIO presence on powernv, then the "core" xive
> object should probably be TYPE_DEVICE, with the powernv specific
> device being a SysBusDevice which incorporates the core xive device
> inside it.

No the ones above are on PAPR. PowerNV has even more :-)

The TIMA (thread management area) is the MMIO area through which
you control the current CPU priority etc...

It's designed in HW to "know" which core/thread is accessing it (it's
at a fixed address) and respond appropriately based on that and which
virtual CPU has been activated on that core/thread.

It's part of what allows XIVE to deliver interrupts without any HV
calls.

Cheers,
Ben.