Re: [PATCH RFC] x86/acpi: don't ignore I/O APICs just because there's no local APIC

[Eric W. Biederman]

Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx> writes:

> On 06/17/09 19:58, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>>> One of the options we discussed was changing the API to get rid of the exposed
>>> vector, and just replace it with an operation to directly bind a gsi to a pirq
>>> (internal Xen physical interrupt handle, if you will), so that Xen ends up doing
>>> all the I/O APIC programming internally, as well as the local APIC.
>>>     
>>
>> As an abstraction layer I think that will work out a lot better long term.
>>
>> Given what iommus with irqs and DMA I expect you want something like
>> that, that can be used from domU.  Then you just make allowing the
>> operation conditional on if you happen to have the associated hardware
>> mapped into your domain.
>>   
>
> A domU with a PCI passthrough device can bind a pirq to one of its event
> channels.  All the gsi->pirq binding happens in dom0, but binding a pirq
> to event channel can happen anywhere (that's why it doesn't bind gsi
> directly to event channel, as they're strictly per-domain).
>
> MSI interrupts also get bound to pirqs, so once the binding is created,
> MSI and GSI interrupts can be treated identically (I think, I haven't
> looked into the details yet).
>
>>> On the Linux side, I think it means we can just point pcibios_enable/disable_irq
>>> to our own xen_pci_irq_enable/disable functions to create the binding between a
>>> PCI device and an irq.
>>>     
>>
>> If you want xen to assign the linux irq number that is absolutely the properly place
>> to hook.
>>   
>
> Yes.  We'd want to keep the irq==gsi mapping for non-MSI interrupts, but
> that's easy enough to arrange.
>
>> When I was messing with the irq code I did not recall finding many
>> cases where migrating irqs from process context worked without hitting
>> hardware bugs.  ioapic state machine lockups and the like.
>>   
>
> Keir mentioned that Xen avoids masking/unmasking interrupts in the I/O
> APIC too much, because that has been problematic in the past.  Is that
> related to the problems you're talking about?  Is there anywhere which
> documents them?

Not in great detail.  I have some comments in the code and some messages
on the mailing list.

What I know is that in linux the historical practice has always been
to migrate irqs in interrupt context and in testing I found I could
lock up ioapic state machines when I migrate interrupts from process
context enough.

It really cleans up the code not to migrate interrupts in the
interrupt handler.  So I spent a week or two on it.

>> How does Xen handle domU with hardware directly mapped?
>>   
>
> We call that "pci passthrough".  Dom0 will bind the gsi to a pirq as
> usual, and then pass the pirq through to the domU.  The domU will bind
> the pirq to an event channel, which gets mapped to a Linux irq and
> handled as usual.

Interesting.  How does domU find out the pirq -> pci device mapping?

>> Temporally ignoring what we have to do to work with Xen 3.4.  I'm curious
>> if we could make the Xen dom0 irq case the same as the Xen domU case.
>>   
>
> It is already; once the pirq is prepared, the process is the same in
> both cases.

I 3/4 believe that.  map_domain_pirq  appears to setup a per domain
mapping between the hardware vector and the irq name it is known as.
So I don't see how that works for other domains.

msi is setup on a per domain basis.

Eric
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