Re: [PATCH 0/3] PCI: Expose resource resizing through sysfs

From: Christian König
Date: Wed Aug 17 2022 - 06:10:56 EST


Am 16.08.22 um 21:39 schrieb Alex Williamson:
We have a couple graphics drivers making use of PCIe Resizable BARs
now, but I've been trying to figure out how we can make use of such
features for devices assigned to a VM. This is a proposal for a
rather basic interface in sysfs such that we have the ability to
pre-enable larger BARs before we bind devices to vfio-pci and
attach them to a VM.

Ah, yes please.

I was considering doing this myself just for testing while adding the rebar support for the GFX drivers, but then just implementing it on the GFX side was simpler.

I would just add a warning that resizing BARs can easily crash the system even when no driver directly claimed the resource or PCIe device.

It literally took me weeks to figure out that I need to kick out the EFI framebuffer driver before trying to resize the BAR or otherwise I just get a hung system.

Along the way I found a double-free in the error path of creating
resource attributes, that can certainly be pulled separately (1/).

I'm using an RTX6000 for testing, which unexpectedly only supports
REBAR with smaller than default sizes, which led me to question
why we have such heavy requirements for shrinking resources (2/).

Oh, that's easy. You got tons of ARM boards with less than 512MiB of address space per root PCIe complex.

If you want to get a GPU working on those you need to decrease the BAR size or otherwise you won't be able to fit 256MiB VRAM BAR + register BAR into the same hole for the PCIe root complex.

An alternative explanation is that at least AMD produced some boards with a messed up resize configuration word. But on those you only got 256MiB, 512MiB and 1GiB potential BAR sizes IIRC.

Anyway, with an appropriate warning added to the sysfs documentation the patch #2 and #3 are Acked-by: Christian König <christian.koenig@xxxxxxx>

Regards,
Christian.


The final patch proposes the sysfs interface and I'll leave the
discussion there for whether this is a good approach. Thanks,

Alex
---

Alex Williamson (3):
PCI: Fix double-free in resource attribute error path
PCI: Skip reassigning bridge resources if reducing BAR size
PCI: Expose PCIe Resizable BAR support via sysfs


Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-bus-pci | 27 +++++
drivers/pci/pci-sysfs.c | 126 +++++++++++++++++++++++-
drivers/pci/setup-res.c | 2 +-
include/linux/pci.h | 1 +
4 files changed, 154 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)