Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 0/4] virtio-mmio transport

[Pawel Moll]

On Mon, 2011-12-12 at 12:14 +0000, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> I noticed the virtio-mmio spec has an interrupt status register.  On
> x86 and virtio-pci things are moving towards Message Signalled
> Interrupts and virtqueues having their own interrupts for better
> performance and flexibility.  Any thoughts on how 1 interrupt per
> virtqueue works for virtio-mmio?

This could be done by either creating devices with more then one
interrupt (platform device can take any number of resources) and
declaring that first queue uses the first one etc.

> My feeling is that the interrupt details are board-specific and can't
> be described in virtio-mmio, 

It's just the the "design pattern" in the "embedded world" that devices
usually have one interrupt output, shared between its internal
functions. And - of course - there is no in-band signalling (like MSI)
possible - interrupt lines are just "wires" :-) In a boundary case
scenario we may face a situation when total amount of interrupts for all
queues may actually exceed amount of interrupt inputs available in the
interrupt controller...

There may be a half-way solution - one interrupt per device but the
"active" queue number notified via the interrupt status register (as a
FIFO) so the driver wouldn't have to enumerate all the queues.

> but it still jumped out at me that it
> looks like you're only thinking of 1 interrupt for the device.

Yes, current version assumes tgat. I'll keep this in mind when planning
changes for v2 (next year ;-), thanks for letting me know!

Cheers!

Paweł