Re: [PATCH 0/8] s390x/pci: Fixing s390 vfio-pci ISM support

[Pierre Morel]

On 1/21/21 2:37 PM, Niklas Schnelle wrote:
> On 1/21/21 1:30 PM, Pierre Morel wrote:

> > > Just wanted to say that we've had a very similar discussion with
> > > Cornelia end of last year and came to the conclusion that explicitly
> > > matching the PFT is likely the safest bet:
> > > https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/12/22/479
> >
> > What I see there is a discussion on the relation between relaxed access and MIO 
> > without explaining to Connie that we have in the kernel the possibility to know 
> > if a device support MIO or not independently of it supports the relaxed access.
> >
> > The all point here is about taking decisions for the right reasons.
> >
> > We have the possibility to take the decision based on functionalities and not 
> > on a specific PCI function.
>
> Yes but that goes both ways the functionality of the region has to match
> that of the device and at least in it's current state the regions functionality
> matches only ISM in a way that is so specific that it is very unlikely to match 
> anything
> else. For example it can't support a PCI device that requires non-MIO but
> also MSI-X. In its current form it doesn't even support PCI Store only PCI Store
> Block, we had that in an earlier version and it's trivial but then we get the 
> MSI-X
> problem.


What does that change if we take one or the other solution considering 
the checking of MIO/MSIX/relax versus PFT?


> > If we keep the PFT check, and we can do this of course, but is it a good 
> > solution if it appears we have other PFT with the same functionalities?
> >
> > Please note that this is a minor code change, keeping track of the MIO support 
> > just as we keep track of the PFT and check on this instead of on the PFT.
>
> That is certainly true and I'm not strongly against matching on functionality
> it just seems to me that it's too specific for that to make sense and
> in that case I feel it's better to be clear about that and make it ISM
> specific in name and functionality.
>
> If we manage to find a fix for the MSI-X problem which I'd be really happy about
> we can simply extend the regions functionality and reuse the same code
> for a backwards compatibile ISM region and a more generic zPCI non-MIO
> region that could even be used if the client (QEMU) uses non-MIO and
> the device can do both as is the case for all current physical devices.


I think that the fix for this is in the kernel, in the MIO implementation.
But we better discuss this offline.


Since neither of us have the decision, why don't we let the maintainer 
discuss now that they have all the information.

Regards,
Pierre

--
Pierre Morel
IBM Lab Boeblingen