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Re: [Xen-devel] [v2][PATCH] libxl: add one machine property to support IGD GFX passthrough



On 2015/2/3 19:07, Ian Campbell wrote:
On Tue, 2015-02-03 at 09:04 +0800, Chen, Tiejun wrote:

On 2015/2/2 20:54, Ian Jackson wrote:
Wei Liu writes ("Re: [v2][PATCH] libxl: add one machine property to support IGD GFX 
passthrough"):
On Mon, Feb 02, 2015 at 09:17:23AM +0800, Tiejun Chen wrote:
When we're working to support IGD GFX passthrough with qemu
upstream, instead of "-gfx_passthru" we'd like to make that
a machine option, "-machine xxx,-igd-passthru=on". This need
to bring a change on tool side.
...
My suggestion has one premise -- if upstream QEMU has already released
that -gfx_passthru option. If there is no "old one" (in upstream QEMU)
at all, then there is nothing to keep and deprecate.

I think the commit message of the xen.git commit should explain what
options are supported by which versions of qemu (including qemu
upstream's future plans).

That would provide (a) something which summarises the communication
etc. with qemu upstream and can be checked with them if necessary and
(b) something against which the libxl changes can be easily judged.

Sorry, looks I'm misleading this to everyone.

Here I picked my reply from another email:

Actually qemu upstream never own this option, '-gfx_passthru' at all.
This just exists alone in qemu-xen-traditional. So here I'm trying to
introduce a new stuff that doesn't clash anything in qemu upstream.

So I guess I should rephrase this as follows:

      libxl: add one machine property to support IGD GFX passthrough

      When we're working to support IGD GFX passthrough with qemu
      upstream, we'd like to introduce a machine option,

Has this new option been acked/accepted into the upstream qemu code base
yet? I think there should also be a reference to the relevant qemu.git

Yes, Gerd just recommend this option and I guess this should be acked as well :)

changeset as well as to any useful conversations about it.

I just post this patch prior to those qemu patch supporting IGD passthrough since I need this option is acked on Xen side. Then I can continue submitting all qemu patches.


      "-machine xxx,igd-passthru=on", to enable/disable that feature.
      And we also remove that old option, "-gfx_passthru", just from
      the case of LIBXL_DEVICE_MODEL_VERSION_QEMU_XEN since actually
      no any qemu stream version really need or use that.
                    ^up ?

What happens if you pass this new option to an older version of qemu
upstream? I suppose it doesn't fail any worse than passing -gfx_passthru
would have done.

Neither '-gfx_passthru' nor 'igd-passthrou' exists in any version of qemu upstream. As I mentioned previously, just now we're starting to support this in qemu upstream :)

But you known, on Xen side we have two qemu versions, qemu-xen-traditional and qemu-xen. Although '-gfx_passthru' is adopted in both two versions, just qemu-xen-traditional supports IGD passthrough completely. For qemu-xen, we just have this term definition but without that IGD passthrough feature support actually.

And now we're trying to support IGD passthrough in qemu stream. This mean we should set 'device_model_version="qemu-xen", right? Then libxl still pass '-gfx_passthru' to qemu upstream. But when I post other stuffs to qemu upstream community to support IGD passthrough. Gerd thought "-machine xxx,igd-passthru=on" is better than '-gfx_passthru'. So finally you see this change in Xen/tools/libxl.


I have one more general concern, which is that hardcoding igd-passthru
here may make it harder to support gfx_passthru of other cards in the
future.

Actually gfx_passthrou is introduced to just work for IGD passthrough since something specific to IGD is tricky, so we have to need such a flag to handle this precisely, like its fixed at 00:02.0, and expose some ISA bridge PCI config info and even host bridge PCI config info.

So I don't thing other cards need this.


Somehow something in the stack needs to either detect or be told which
kind of card to passthrough. Automatic detection would be preferable,
but maybe being told by the user is the only possibility.

Based on the above explanation, something should be done before we detect to construct that real card , so its difficulty to achieve this goal currently.


Is there any way, given gfx_passthru as a boolean that libxl can
automatically figure out that IGD passthru is what is actually desired
-- e.g. by scanning the set of PCI devices given to the guest perhaps?

Sorry I don't understand what you mean here. Currently, we have to set something as follows,

gfx_passthru=1
pci=["00:02.0"]

This always works for qemu-xen-traditional.

But you should know '00:02.0' doesn't mean we are passing IGD through.


If not then that _might_ suggest we should deprecate the gdx_passthru
option at the libxl interface and switch to something more expressive,
such as an Enumeration of card types (with a singleton of IGD right
now), but I'm not really very familiar with passthru nor the qemu side
of this.

What happens if you try to pass two different GFX cards to a guest?


Are you saying two IGDs? Its not possible since as I said above, IGD is tricky because it depends on something from ISA bridge and host bridge. So we can't provide two or more different setting configurations to own more IGDs just in one platform.

Thanks
Tiejun


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