Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 12/13] intel_iommu: ioapic: IR support for emulated IOAPIC

[Jan Kiszka]

On 2016-04-12 20:33, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 08:39:02AM -0700, Jan Kiszka wrote:
>> On 2016-04-12 02:02, Peter Xu wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>>> Yes, I should consider other x86 platforms like AMD. Thanks to point
>>> out. It seems that there are many places in the patchset that lacks
>>> thorough consideration about this. Will try to fix them in next
>>> version.
>>>
>>> Regarding to the above MSI solution: I'd say it is a good way to
>>> hide everything else behind.  However, since we introduced one extra
>>> layer (MSI) which actually does not exist, not sure there would be
>>> problem too.  Also, I feel it a little bit hacky if we "create" one
>>> MSI out of the air...  For example, if someone tries to capture MSIs
>>> from QEMU inside in the APIC memory writes, he will see something he
>>> cannot explain if he never knows this hack's there.  Considering the
>>> above, I would prefer hooks, or better to provide a callback (a
>>> function pointer that others like AMD can override) to do the
>>> translation.  How do you think?
>>
>> The HPET does send MSIs, and I'm not sure how much different the
>> IOAPIC's message actually is. In any case, modelling it as MSI is
>> neither adding incorrectness nor making the code more complex (in fact,
>> the contrary is true!). Last but not least, it would be trivial to
>> filter out non-PCI MSI sources if we wanted to trace only PCI - because
>> we need to identify the origin anyway for remapping purposes. So,
>> explicit hooking looks like the wrong way to me.
> 
> I am just not sure about the difference between IOAPIC's messages
> and MSI ones. For now, they seems very alike. However, I am not sure
> whether it would be not alike in the future. E.g., if one day, we
> extend APIC bus to support more than 255 CPUs (could it? I do not
> know for sure), here if we are with this "MSI layer", we would not
> be able to do that, since MSI only support 8 bits for destination ID
> field. That's my only worry now. If you (or Radim? or anyone more
> experienced on this than me) can confirm that this would never be a
> problem, I'd be glad to take the MSI way.

That's one of the reason why we need IR: >255 is only possible this way,
because it requires x2APIC and that requires IR (see Intel spec). So,
IOAPIC messages will then always travel via VT-d. No need to worry at all.

Jan