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Re: PCI devices passthrough on Arm design proposal



On 17/07/2020 15:47, Bertrand Marquis wrote:

# Title:

PCI devices passthrough on Arm design proposal

# Problem statement:

On ARM there in no support to assign a PCI device to a guest. PCI device 
passthrough capability allows guests to have full access to some PCI devices. 
PCI device passthrough allows PCI devices to appear and behave as if they were 
physically attached to the guest operating system and provide full isolation of 
the PCI devices.

Goal of this work is to also support Dom0Less configuration so the PCI backend/frontend 
drivers used on x86 shall not be used on Arm. It will use the existing VPCI concept from X86 
and implement the virtual PCI bus through IO emulation​ such that only assigned 
devices are visible​ to the guest and guest can use the standard PCI driver.

Only Dom0 and Xen will have access to the real PCI bus,​ guest will have a direct access to 
the assigned device itself​. IOMEM memory will be mapped to the guest ​and interrupt 
will be redirected to the guest. SMMU has to be configured correctly to have DMA transaction.

## Current state: Draft version

# Proposer(s): Rahul Singh, Bertrand Marquis

# Proposal:

This section will describe the different subsystem to support the PCI device 
passthrough and how these subsystems interact with each other to assign a 
device to the guest.

# PCI Terminology:

Host Bridge: Host bridge allows the PCI devices to talk to the rest of the 
computer.
ECAM: ECAM (Enhanced Configuration Access Mechanism) is a mechanism developed 
to allow PCIe to access configuration space. The space available per function 
is 4KB.

# Discovering PCI Host Bridge in XEN:

In order to support the PCI passthrough XEN should be aware of all the PCI host bridges available on the 
system and should be able to access the PCI configuration space. ECAM configuration access is supported as 
of now. XEN during boot will read the PCI device tree node “reg” property and will map the 
ECAM space to the XEN memory using the “ioremap_nocache ()” function.

If there are more than one segment on the system, XEN will read the “linux, pci-domain” property from the 
device tree node and configure  the host bridge segment number accordingly. All the PCI device tree nodes should have the 
“linux,pci-domain” property so that there will be no conflicts. During hardware domain boot Linux will also 
use the same “linux,pci-domain” property and assign the domain number to the host bridge.

AFAICT, "linux,pci-domain" is not a mandatory option and mostly tie to Linux. 
What would happen with other OS?
But I would rather avoid trying to mandate a user to modifying his/her 
device-tree in order to support PCI passthrough. It would be better to consider 
Xen to assign the number if it is not present.


so you would suggest here that if this entry is not present in the 
configuration, we just assign a value inside xen ? How should this information 
be passed to the guest ?
This number is required for the current hypercall to declare devices to xen so 
those could end up being different.
I am guessing you mean passing to the hardware domain? If so, Xen is already rewriting the device-tree for the hardware domain. So it would be easy to add more property.
Now the question is whether other OSes are using "linux,pci-domain". I would suggest to have a look at a *BSD to see how they deal with PCI controllers. 





When Dom0 tries to access the PCI config space of the device, XEN will find the 
corresponding host bridge based on segment number and access the corresponding 
config space assigned to that bridge.

Limitation:
* Only PCI ECAM configuration space access is supported.
* Device tree binding is supported as of now, ACPI is not supported.

We want to differentiate the high-level design from the actual implementation. 
While you may not yet implement ACPI, we still need to keep it in mind to avoid 
incompatibilities in long term.


For sure we do not want to make anything which would not be possible to 
implement with ACPI.
I hope the community will help us during review to find those possible problems 
if we do not see them.
Have a look at the design document I pointed out in my previous answer. It should contain a lot of information already for ACPI :). 




* Need to port the PCI host bridge access code to XEN to access the 
configuration space (generic one works but lots of platforms will required  
some specific code or quirks).

# Discovering PCI devices:

PCI-PCIe enumeration is a process of detecting devices connected to its host. 
It is the responsibility of the hardware domain or boot firmware to do the PCI 
enumeration and configure the BAR, PCI capabilities, and MSI/MSI-X 
configuration.

PCI-PCIe enumeration in XEN is not feasible for the configuration part as it 
would require a lot of code inside Xen which would require a lot of 
maintenance. Added to this many platforms require some quirks in that part of 
the PCI code which would greatly improve Xen complexity. Once hardware domain 
enumerates the device then it will communicate to XEN via the below hypercall.

#define PHYSDEVOP_pci_device_add        25
struct physdev_pci_device_add {
      uint16_t seg;
      uint8_t bus;
      uint8_t devfn;
      uint32_t flags;
      struct {
          uint8_t bus;
          uint8_t devfn;
      } physfn;
      /*
      * Optional parameters array.
      * First element ([0]) is PXM domain associated with the device (if * 
XEN_PCI_DEV_PXM is set)
      */
      uint32_t optarr[XEN_FLEX_ARRAY_DIM];
      };

As the hypercall argument has the PCI segment number, XEN will access the PCI 
config space based on this segment number and find the host-bridge 
corresponding to this segment number. At this stage host bridge is fully 
initialized so there will be no issue to access the config space.

XEN will add the PCI devices in the linked list maintain in XEN using the 
function pci_add_device(). XEN will be aware of all the PCI devices on the 
system and all the device will be added to the hardware domain.

I understand this what x86 does. However, may I ask why we would want it for 
Arm?


We wanted to be as near as possible from x86 implementation and design.
But if you have an other idea here we are fully open to discuss it.
In the case of platform device passthrough, we are leaving the device unassigned when not using by a guest. This makes sure the device can't do any harm if somehow it wasn't reset correctly.
I would prefer to consider the same approach for PCI devices if there is no plan to use it in dom0. Although, we need to figure out how PCI devices will be reset. 


* Dom0Less implementation will require to have the capacity inside Xen to 
discover the PCI devices (without depending on Dom0 to declare them to Xen).

# Enable the existing x86 virtual PCI support for ARM:

The existing VPCI support available for X86 is adapted for Arm. When the device is added to 
XEN via the hyper call “PHYSDEVOP_pci_device_add”, VPCI handler for the config 
space access is added to the PCI device to emulate the PCI devices.

A MMIO trap handler for the PCI ECAM space is registered in XEN so that when 
guest is trying to access the PCI config space, XEN will trap the access and 
emulate read/write using the VPCI and not the real PCI hardware.

Limitation:
* No handler is register for the MSI configuration.
* Only legacy interrupt is supported and tested as of now, MSI is not 
implemented and tested.

IIRC, legacy interrupt may be shared between two PCI devices. How do you plan 
to handle this on Arm?


We plan to fix this by adding proper support for MSI in the long term.
For the use case where MSI is not supported or not wanted we might have to find 
a way to forward the hardware interrupt to several guests to emulate some kind 
of shared interrupt.
Sharing interrupts are a bit pain because you couldn't take advantage of the direct EOI in HW and have to be careful if one guest doesn't EOI in timely maneer.
This is something I would rather avoid unless there is a real use case for it. 





# Assign the device to the guest:

Assign the PCI device from the hardware domain to the guest is done using the 
below guest config option. When xl tool create the domain, PCI devices will be 
assigned to the guest VPCI bus.

Above, you suggest that device will be assigned to the hardware domain at boot. 
I am assuming this also means that all the interrupts/MMIOs will be 
routed/mapped, is that correct?
If so, can you provide a rough sketch how assign/deassign will work?


Yes this is correct. We will improve the design and add a more detailed 
description on that in the next version.
To make it short we remove the resources from the hardware domain first and 
assign them to the guest the device has been assigned to. There are still some 
parts in there where we are still in investigation mode on that part.
Hmmm... Does this mean you modified the code to allow a interrupt to be removed while the domain is still running? 




     pci=[ "PCI_SPEC_STRING", "PCI_SPEC_STRING", ...]

Guest will be only able to access the assigned devices and see the bridges. 
Guest will not be able to access or see the devices that are no assigned to him.

Limitation:
* As of now all the bridges in the PCI bus are seen by the guest on the VPCI 
bus.

Why do you want to expose all the bridges to a guest? Does this mean that the 
BDF should always match between the host and the guest?


That’s not really something that we wanted but this was the easiest way to go.
As said in a previous mail we could build a VPCI bus with a completely 
different topology but I am not sure of the advantages this would have.
Do you see some reason to do this ?


Yes :):
1) If a platform has two host controllers (IIRC Thunder-X has it) then you would need to expose two host controllers to your guest. I think this is undesirable if your guest is only using a couple of PCI devices on each host controllers. 2) In the case of migration (live or not), you may want to use a difference PCI card on the target platform. So your BDF and bridges may be different. 

Therefore I think the virtual topology can be beneficial.





# Emulated PCI device tree node in libxl:

Libxl is creating a virtual PCI device tree node in the device tree to enable the guest 
OS to discover the virtual PCI during guest boot. We introduced the new config option 
[vpci="pci_ecam"] for guests. When this config option is enabled in a guest 
configuration, a PCI device tree node will be created in the guest device tree.

A new area has been reserved in the arm guest physical map at which the VPCI 
bus is declared in the device tree (reg and ranges parameters of the node). A 
trap handler for the PCI ECAM access from guest has been registered at the 
defined address and redirects requests to the VPCI driver in Xen.

Limitation:
* Only one PCI device tree node is supported as of now.

BAR value and IOMEM mapping:

Linux guest will do the PCI enumeration based on the area reserved for ECAM and 
IOMEM ranges in the VPCI device tree node. Once PCI    device is assigned to 
the guest, XEN will map the guest PCI IOMEM region to the real physical IOMEM 
region only for the assigned devices.

As of now we have not modified the existing VPCI code to map the guest PCI IOMEM region to 
the real physical IOMEM region. We used the existing guest “iomem” config 
option to map the region.
For example:
     Guest reserved IOMEM region:  0x04020000
          Real physical IOMEM region:0x50000000
          IOMEM size:128MB
          iomem config will be:   iomem = ["0x50000,0x8000@0x4020"]

There is no need to map the ECAM space as XEN already have access to the ECAM 
space and XEN will trap ECAM accesses from the guest and will perform 
read/write on the VPCI bus.

IOMEM access will not be trapped and the guest will directly access the IOMEM 
region of the assigned device via stage-2 translation.

In the same, we mapped the assigned devices IRQ to the guest using below config 
options.
     irqs= [ NUMBER, NUMBER, ...]

Limitation:
* Need to avoid the “iomem” and “irq” guest config options and map the IOMEM region and IRQ 
at the same time when device is assigned to the guest using the “pci” guest config options when xl creates 
the domain.
* Emulated BAR values on the VPCI bus should reflect the IOMEM mapped address.
* X86 mapping code should be ported on Arm so that the stage-2 translation is 
adapted when the guest is doing a modification of the BAR registers values (to 
map the address requested by the guest for a specific IOMEM to the address 
actually contained in the real BAR register of the corresponding device).

# SMMU configuration for guest:

When assigning PCI devices to a guest, the SMMU configuration should be updated 
to remove access to the hardware domain memory and add
configuration to have access to the guest memory with the proper address 
translation so that the device can do DMA operations from and to the guest 
memory only.

There are a few more questions to answer here:
    - When a guest is destroyed, who will be the owner of the PCI devices? 
Depending on the answer, how do you make sure the device is quiescent?


I would say the hardware domain if there is one otherwise nobody.
This is risky, in particular if your device is not quiescent (e.g because the reset failed). This would mean your device may be able to rewrite part of Dom0. 


On the quiescent part this is definitely something for which I have no answer 
for now and any suggestion is more then welcome.
Usually you will have to reset a device, but I am not sure this can always work properly. Hence, I think assigning the PCI devices to nobody would be more sensible. Note this is what XSA-306 aimed to do on x86 (not yet implemented on Arm). 




    - Is there any memory access that can bypassed the IOMMU (e.g doorbell)?


This is still something to be investigated as part of the MSI implementation.
If you have any idea here, feel free to tell us.
My memory is a bit fuzzy here. I am sure that the doorbell can bypass the IOMMU on some platform, but I also vaguely remember that accesses to the PCI host controller memory window may also bypass the IOMMU. A good reading might be [2].
IIRC, I came to the conclusion that we may want to use the host memory map in the guest when using the PCI passthrough. But maybe not on all the platforms. 

Cheers,


[1] https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2017-05/msg02520.html


[2] https://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm/msg140116.html


--
Julien Grall





--
Julien Grall

 

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