Re: [PATCH 2/2] xen/virtio: Avoid use of the dom0 backend in dom0

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

Hi,

FWIW, I have ran into this issue some time ago too. I run Xen on top of
KVM and then passthrough some of the virtio devices (network one
specifically) into a (PV) guest. So, I hit both cases, the dom0 one and
domU one. As a temporary workaround I needed to disable
CONFIG_XEN_VIRTIO completely (just disabling
CONFIG_XEN_VIRTIO_FORCE_GRANT was not enough to fix it).
With that context in place, the actual response below.

On Tue, Jul 04, 2023 at 12:39:40PM +0200, Juergen Gross wrote:
> On 04.07.23 09:48, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 03:44:04PM -0700, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > > On Thu, 29 Jun 2023, Oleksandr Tyshchenko wrote:
> > > > On 29.06.23 04:00, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > > > > I think we need to add a second way? It could be anything that can help
> > > > > us distinguish between a non-grants-capable virtio backend and a
> > > > > grants-capable virtio backend, such as:
> > > > > - a string on xenstore
> > > > > - a xen param
> > > > > - a special PCI configuration register value
> > > > > - something in the ACPI tables
> > > > > - the QEMU machine type
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > Yes, I remember there was a discussion regarding that. The point is to
> > > > choose a solution to be functional for both PV and HVM *and* to be able
> > > > to support a hotplug. IIRC, the xenstore could be a possible candidate.
> > > 
> > > xenstore would be among the easiest to make work. The only downside is
> > > the dependency on xenstore which otherwise virtio+grants doesn't have.
> > 
> > I would avoid introducing a dependency on xenstore, if nothing else we
> > know it's a performance bottleneck.
> > 
> > We would also need to map the virtio device topology into xenstore, so
> > that we can pass different options for each device.
> 
> This aspect (different options) is important. How do you want to pass virtio
> device configuration parameters from dom0 to the virtio backend domain? You
> probably need something like Xenstore (a virtio based alternative like virtiofs
> would work, too) for that purpose.
> 
> Mapping the topology should be rather easy via the PCI-Id, e.g.:
> 
> /local/domain/42/device/virtio/0000:00:1c.0/backend

While I agree this would probably be the simplest to implement, I don't
like introducing xenstore dependency into virtio frontend either.
Toolstack -> backend communication is probably easier to solve, as it's
much more flexible (could use qemu cmdline, QMP, other similar
mechanisms for non-qemu backends etc).

> > > Vikram is working on virtio with grants support in QEMU as we speak.
> > > Maybe we could find a way to add a flag in QEMU so that we can detect at
> > > runtime if a given virtio device support grants or not.
> > 
> > Isn't there a way for the device to expose capabilities already?  For
> > example how does a virtio-blk backend expose support for indirect
> > descriptors?
> 
> Those capabilities are defined in the virtio spec [1]. Adding the backend
> domid would be possible, but it probably wouldn't be that easy (requires
> changing the virtio spec by either expanding an existing config area or by
> adding a new one). I'm not sure handling in the specific frontends is
> generic enough for being able to have a central place where the backend
> domid could be retrieved, without requiring any change of the frontends.

IMHO the proper solution is to extend the spec. I don't have much
experience with virtio code, but reading the spec it looks like new
config area will be better for compatibility/uniform handling in a
frontent-agnostic way. Since it will definitely take time, some
transitional solution (maybe even xenstore...) might be warranted.

> Juergen
> 
> [1]: http://docs.oasis-open.org/virtio/virtio/v1.2/virtio-v1.2.html






-- 
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab

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