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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 00/25 v7] SBSA UART emulation support in Xen



Hi Bhupinder,

I gave another and I have a couple of comments.

Booting Linux with earlycon enabled take quite a while. I can see the characters coming slower than on the minitel. It seems to be a bit better after switching off the bootconsole. Overall Linux is taking ~20 times to boot with pl011 vs HVC console.

I do agree that pl011 is emulated and therefore you have to trap after each character. But 20 times sounds far too much.

After that I tried to stress the emulation a bit with "find ." to get a lot of output. And I noticed a lot of message similar to the one below on xen console:

d6v0 vpl011: Unexpected OUT ring buffer full

Associated to that the character have been eaten resulting to non-sense log.

A bit above the printk printing this message, there are a comment saying:

    /*
* It is expected that the ring is not full when this function is called
     * as the guest is expected to write to the data register only when the
     * TXFF flag is not set.
     * In case the guest does write even when the TXFF flag is set then the
     * data will be silently dropped.
     */

I am quite surprised that Linux is not looking at the TXFF flags. So this needs some investigation.

Cheers,

On 07/08/17 09:52, Bhupinder Thakur wrote:
SBSA UART emulation for guests in Xen
======================================
Linaro has published VM System specification for ARM Processors, which
provides a set of guidelines for both guest OS and hypervisor implementations,
such that building OS images according to these guidelines guarantees
that those images can also run on hypervisors compliant with this specification.

One of the spec requirements is that the hypervisor must provide an
emulated SBSA UART as a serial console which meets the minimum requirements in
SBSA UART as defined in appendix B of the following
ARM Server Base Architecture Document:

https://static.docs.arm.com/den0029/a/Server_Base_System_Architecture_v3_1_ARM_DEN_0029A.pdf.

This feature allows the Xen guests to use SBSA compliant UART as
as a console.

Note that SBSA UART is a subset of full featured ARM pl011 UART and
supports only a subset of registers as mentioned below. It does not support
rx/tx DMA.

Currently, Xen supports paravirtualized (aka PV console) and an emulated serial
consoles. This feature will expose an emulated SBSA UART console to the
guest, which a user can access using xenconsole.

The device tree passed to the guest VM will contain the SBSA UART MMIO address
range and an irq for receiving rx/tx interrupts. The device tree format
is specified in Documentation/devicetree/bindings/serial/arm_sbsa_uart.txt.

The Xen hypervisor will expose two types of interfaces to the backend and domU.

The interface exposed to domU will be an emulated SBSA UART by emulating the
access to the following registers by the guest.

- Data register (DR)            - RW
- Raw interrupt status register (RIS)   - RO
- Masked interrupt status register (MIS)- RO
- Interrupt Mask (IMSC)         - RW
- Interrupt Clear (ICR)         - WO

It will also inject the interrupts to the guest in the following
conditions:

- incoming data in the rx buffer for the guest
- there is space in the tx buffer for the guest to write more data

The interface exposed to the backend will be the same PV console interface,
which minimizes the changes required in xenconsole to support a new SBSA UART
console.

This interface has rx and tx ring buffers and an event channel for
sending/receiving events from the backend.

So essentially Xen handles the data on behalf of domU and the backend. Any data
written by domU is captured by Xen and written to the TX (OUT) ring buffer
and an event is raised to the backend to read the TX ring buffer.

Similarly on reciving an event from xenconsole, Xen injects an interrupt to 
guest to
indicate there is data available in the RX (IN) ring buffer.

The SBSA UART state is completely captured in the set of registers
mentioned above and this state is updated everytime there is an event from
the backend or there is register read/write access from domU.

For example, if domU has masked the rx interrupt in the IMSC register, then Xen
will not inject an interrupt to guest and will just update the RIS register.
Once the interrupt is unmasked by guest, the interrupt will be delivered to the
guest.

Changes summary:

Xen Hypervisor
===============

1. Add emulation code to emulate read/write access to SBSA UART registers and
   interrupts:
    - It emulates DR read/write by reading and writing from/to the IN and
      OUT ring buffers and raising an event to dom0 when there is data in
      the OUT ring buffer and injecting an interrupt to the guest when there
      is data in the IN ring buffer.
    - Other registers are related to interrupt management and essentially
      control when interrupts are delivered to the guest.

2. Add a new domctl API to initialize SBSA UART emulation in Xen.

3. Enable SBSA UART emulation for a domain based on a libxl option passed during
   domain creation.

Toolstack
==========

1. Add a new option "vuart" in the domU configuration file to enable/disable 
vuart.

2. Create a SBSA UART DT node in the guest device tree. It uses a fixed
   SPI IRQ number and MMIO address range for SBSA UART.

3. Call vuart init DOMCTL API to enable SBSA UART emulation.

5. Add a new vuart xenstore node, which contains:
    - ring-ref
    - event channel
    - buffer limit
    - type

Xenconsoled
============

1. Split the domain structure to support multiple consoles.

2. Modify different APIs such as buffer_append() etc. to operate on the
   console structure.

3. Add support for handling multiple consoles.

4. Add support for vuart console:

The vpl011 changes available at the following repo:

url: https://git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:/people/bhupinder.thakur/xen.git
branch: vpl011_v6

Kindly wait for one day to checkout the code from the above URL.

There are some TBD items which need to be looked at in the future:

1. Currently UEFI firmware logs the output to hvc console only. How can
   UEFI firmware be made aware of pl011 console and how it can use it
   as a console instead of hvc.

   There was a discussion on this and it was decided that SBSA UART should
   be used as a debug port by the UEFI firmware so that all debug output
   is redirected to this port.

2. Linux seems to have hvc console as the default console i.e. if no
   console is specified then it uses hvc as the console. How can an
   option be provided in Linux to select either hvc or pl011 as the
   default console.

   It was suggeted to use the SPCR in ACPI and the stdout-path option in the
   device tree to specify the default console. However, currently hvc console
   is not describable in the ACPI/device tree. This support will have to be
   added to allow the user to specify the default console.

3. ACPI support for pl011 device.

CC: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>
CC: George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>
CC: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@xxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Tim Deegan <tim@xxxxxxx>
CC: Wei Liu <wei.liu2@xxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Julien Grall <julien.grall@xxxxxxx>
CC: Andre Przywara <andre.przywara@xxxxxxx>

Bhupinder Thakur (25):
  xen/arm: vpl011: Define common ring buffer helper functions in
    console.h
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add SBSA UART emulation in Xen
  xen/arm: vpl011: Allocate a new GFN in the toolstack for vuart
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add support for vuart in libxl
  xen/arm: vpl011: Rearrange xen header includes in alphabetical order
    in domctl.c
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new domctl API to initialize vpl011
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new vuart node in the xenstore
  xen/arm: vpl011: Modify xenconsole to define and use a new console
    structure
  xen/arm: vpl011: Rename the console structure field conspath to xspath
  xen/arm: vpl011: Modify xenconsole functions to take console structure
    as input
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new console_init function in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new buffer_available function in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new maybe_add_console_evtchn_fd function in
    xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new maybe_add_console_tty_fd function in
    xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new console_evtchn_unmask function in
    xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new handle_console_ring function in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new handle_console_tty function in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new console_cleanup function in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new console_open_log function in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new console_close_evtchn function in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add support for multiple consoles in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add support for vuart console in xenconsole
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a new vuart console type to xenconsole client
  xen/arm: vpl011: Add a pl011 uart DT node in the guest device tree
  xen/arm: vpl011: Update documentation for vuart console support

 config/arm32.mk                      |   1 +
 config/arm64.mk                      |   1 +
 docs/man/xl.cfg.pod.5.in             |  12 +
 docs/misc/console.txt                |  44 ++-
 tools/console/Makefile               |   3 +-
 tools/console/client/main.c          |  13 +-
 tools/console/daemon/io.c            | 659 +++++++++++++++++++++++------------
 tools/libxc/include/xc_dom.h         |   2 +
 tools/libxc/include/xenctrl.h        |  20 ++
 tools/libxc/xc_dom_arm.c             |   5 +-
 tools/libxc/xc_dom_boot.c            |   2 +
 tools/libxc/xc_domain.c              |  25 ++
 tools/libxl/libxl.h                  |   5 +
 tools/libxl/libxl_arch.h             |   7 +
 tools/libxl/libxl_arm.c              |  74 ++++
 tools/libxl/libxl_console.c          |  47 +++
 tools/libxl/libxl_create.c           |   9 +-
 tools/libxl/libxl_device.c           |   9 +-
 tools/libxl/libxl_dom.c              |   5 +
 tools/libxl/libxl_internal.h         |   6 +
 tools/libxl/libxl_types.idl          |   7 +
 tools/libxl/libxl_types_internal.idl |   1 +
 tools/libxl/libxl_x86.c              |   8 +
 tools/xl/xl_cmdtable.c               |   2 +-
 tools/xl/xl_console.c                |   5 +-
 tools/xl/xl_parse.c                  |   8 +
 xen/arch/arm/Kconfig                 |   7 +
 xen/arch/arm/Makefile                |   1 +
 xen/arch/arm/domain.c                |   6 +
 xen/arch/arm/domctl.c                |  48 ++-
 xen/arch/arm/vpl011.c                | 454 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
 xen/include/asm-arm/domain.h         |   6 +
 xen/include/asm-arm/pl011-uart.h     |   2 +
 xen/include/asm-arm/vpl011.h         |  72 ++++
 xen/include/public/arch-arm.h        |   6 +
 xen/include/public/domctl.h          |  21 ++
 xen/include/public/io/console.h      |   4 +
 37 files changed, 1366 insertions(+), 241 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 xen/arch/arm/vpl011.c
 create mode 100644 xen/include/asm-arm/vpl011.h


--
Julien Grall

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