Re: [RFC 0/4] pci/sriov: support VFs dynamic addition

[Leon Romanovsky]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2022 at 09:47:12PM +0800, Longpeng (Mike, Cloud Infrastructure Service Product Dept.) wrote:
> Hi leon,
> 
> 在 2022/11/12 0:39, Leon Romanovsky 写道:
> > On Fri, Nov 11, 2022 at 10:27:18PM +0800, Longpeng(Mike) wrote:
> > > From: Longpeng <longpeng2@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > 
> > > We can enable SRIOV and add VFs by /sys/bus/pci/devices/..../sriov_numvfs, but
> > > this operation needs to spend lots of time if there has a large amount of VFs.
> > > For example, if the machine has 10 PFs and 250 VFs per-PF, enable all the VFs
> > > concurrently would cost about 200-250ms. However most of them are not need to be
> > > used at the moment, so we can enable SRIOV first but add VFs on demand.
> > 
> > It is unclear what took 200-250ms, is it physical VF creation or bind of
> > the driver to these VFs?
> > 
> It is neither. In our test, we already created physical VFs before, so we
> skipped the 100ms waiting when writing PCI_SRIOV_CTRL. And our driver only
> probes PF, it just returns an error if the function is VF.

It means that you didn't try sriov_drivers_autoprobe. Once it is set to
true, It won't even try to probe VFs.

> 
> The hotspot is the sriov_add_vfs (but no driver probe in fact) which is a
> long procedure. Each step costs only a little, but the total cost is not
> acceptable in some time-sensitive cases.

This is also cryptic to me. In standard SR-IOV deployment, all VFs are
created and configured while operator booted the machine with sriov_drivers_autoprobe
set to false. Once this machine is ready, VFs are assigned to relevant VMs/users
through orchestration SW (IMHO, it is supported by all orchestration SW). 

And only last part (assigning to users) is time-sensitive operation.

> 
> What’s more, the sriov_add_vfs adds the VFs of a PF one by one. So we can
> mostly support 10 concurrent calls if there has 10 PFs.

I wondered, are you using real HW? or QEMU SR-IOV? What is your server
that supports such large number of VFs?

BTW, Your change will probably break all SR-IOV devices in the market as
they rely on PCI subsystem to have VFs ready and configured.

Thanks