[Qemu-devel] Enablig DLPAR capacity on QEMU pSeries

[Erlon Cruz]

Hi all,

We are planning to implement DLPAR capacity on QEMU pSeries. As we
lack of experience in the internals of the arch we would like you guys
to give us some design directions
and confirm if we going in the right direction. Our first idea is:

    1 - to patch 'spapr.c' so it can dynamically insert/remove basic
items into the device tree.
    2 - create a host side device that will be used with a guest side
driver to perform guest side operations and communicate changes from
host to the guest (like DynamicRM does in PowerVM LPARs). We are not
planning to use powerpc-tools and want to make resource management
transparent (i.e. no need to run daemons or userspace programs in the
guest, only this kernel driver).
    3 - create bindings to support adding/removal  ibmvscsi devices
    4 - create bindings to support adding/removal  ibmveth devices
    5 - create bindings to support adding/removal PCI devices
    6 - create bindings to support adding/removal of memory
        - Do we need to do this the way PowerVM does? We have tested
virtio ballooning and it can works with a few endiannes corrections.
    7 - create bindings to support adding/removal  CPUs
        - is SMP supported already? I tried to run SMP in a x86 host
and the guest stuck when SMP is enabled
        - would be possible to work on this without a P7 baremetal
machine? We have a P7 8205-E6B, is that possible to kick PHYP out?

Any ideia on how much effort (time/people) the hole thing would take?
Any consideration about this is much appreciated :)

Kind regards,
Erlon