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Subject: Re: [virtio-comment] [PATCH 1/3] shared memory: Define shared memory regions


On Thu, 14 Feb 2019 09:43:10 -0800
Frank Yang <lfy@google.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 8:37 AM Dr. David Alan Gilbert <dgilbert@redhat.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > * Cornelia Huck (cohuck@redhat.com) wrote:  
> > > On Wed, 13 Feb 2019 18:37:56 +0000
> > > "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >  
> > > > * Cornelia Huck (cohuck@redhat.com) wrote:  
> > > > > On Wed, 16 Jan 2019 20:06:25 +0000
> > > > > "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > >  
> > > > > > So these are all moving this 1/3 forward - has anyone got comments  
> > on  
> > > > > > the transport specific implementations?  
> > > > >
> > > > > No comment on pci or mmio, but I've hacked something together for  
> > ccw.  
> > > > > Basically, one sense-type ccw for discovery and a control-type ccw  
> > for  
> > > > > activation of the regions (no idea if we really need the latter),  
> > both  
> > > > > available with ccw revision 3.
> > > > >
> > > > > No idea whether this will work this way, though...  
> > > >
> > > > That sounds (from a shm perspective) reasonable; can I ask why the
> > > > 'activate' is needed?  
> > >
> > > The activate interface is actually what I'm most unsure about; maybe
> > > Halil can chime in.
> > >
> > > My basic concern is that we don't have any idea how the guest will use
> > > the available memory. If the shared memory areas are supposed to be
> > > mapped into an inconvenient place, the activate interface gives the
> > > guest a chance to clear up that area before the host starts writing to
> > > it.  
> >
> > I'm expecting the host to map it into an area of GPA that is out of the
> > way - it doesn't overlap with RAM.

My issue here is that I'm not sure how to model something like that on
s390...

> > Given that, I'm not sure why the guest would have to do any 'clear up' -
> > it probably wants to make a virtual mapping somewhere, but again that's
> > upto the guest to do when it feels like it.
> >
> >  
> This is what we do with Vulkan as well.
> 
> 
> > > I'm not really enthusiastic about that interface... for one, I'm not
> > > sure how this plays out at the device type level, which should not
> > > really concern itself with transport-specific handling.  
> >
> > I'd expect the host side code to give an area of memory to the transport
> > and tell it to map it somewhere (in the QEMU terminology a MemoryRegion
> > I think).

My main issue is the 'somewhere'.

> >  
> 
> I wonder if this could help: the way we're running Vulkan at the moment,
> what we do is add a the concept of a MemoryRegion with no actual backing:
> 
> https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/topic:%22qemu-user-controlled-hv-mappings%22+(status:open%20OR%20status:merged)
> 
> and it would be connected to the entire PCI address space on the shared
> memory address space realization. So it's kind of like a sparse or deferred
> MemoryRegion.
> 
> When the guest actually wants to map a subregion associated with the host
> memory,
> on the host side, we can call the hypervisor to map the region, based on
> giving the device implementation the functions KVM_SET_USER_MEMORY_REGION
> and analogs.
> 
> This has the advantage of a smaller contact area between shm and qemu,
> where the device level stuff can operate at a separate layer from
> MemoryRegions which is more transport level.

That sounds like an interesting concept, but I'm not quite sure how it
would help with my problem. Read on for more explanation below...

> 
> 
> > Similarly in the guest, I'm expecting the driver for the device to
> > ask for a pointer to a region with a particular ID and that goes
> > down to the transport code.
> >
> > Another option would be to map these into a special memory area that  
> > > the guest won't use for its normal operation... the original s390
> > > (non-ccw) virtio transport mapped everything into two special pages
> > > above the guest memory, but that was quite painful, and I don't think
> > > we want to go down that road again.  
> >
> > Can you explain why?

The background here is that s390 traditionally does not have any
concept of memory-mapped I/O. IOW, you don't just write to or read from
a special memory area; instead, I/O operations use special instructions.

The mechanism I'm trying to extend here is channel I/O: the driver
builds a channel program with commands that point to guest memory areas
and hands it to the channel subsystem (which means, in our case, the
host) via a special instruction. The channel subsystem and the device
(the host, in our case) translate the memory addresses and execute the
commands. The one place where we write shared memory directly in the
virtio case are the virtqueues -- which are allocated in guest memory,
so the guest decides which memory addresses are special. Accessing the
config space of a virtio device via the ccw transport does not
read/write a memory location directly, but instead uses a channel
program that performs the read/write.

For pci, the memory accesses are mapped to special instructions:
reading or writing the config space of a pci device does not perform
reads or writes of a memory location, either; the driver uses special
instructions to access the config space (which are also
interpreted/emulated by QEMU, for example.)

The old s390 (pre-virtio-ccw) virtio transport had to rely on the
knowledge that there were two pages containing the virtqueues etc.
right above the normal memory (probed by checking whether accessing
that memory gave an exception or not). The main problems were that this
was inflexible (the guest had no easy way to find out how many
'special' pages were present, other than trying to access them), and
that it was different from whatever other mechanisms are common on s390.

We might be able to come up with another scheme, but I wouldn't hold my
breath. Would be great if someone else with s390 knowledge could chime
in here.


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