Re: [PATCH v11 1/2] hw/arm/virt: Basic CXL enablement on pci_expander_bridge instances pxb-cxl

[Jonathan Cameron]

On Fri, 24 Jun 2022 15:08:44 +0100
Jonathan Cameron <Jonathan.Cameron@Huawei.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Jun 2022 13:56:32 +0100
> Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 24 Jun 2022 at 13:39, Jonathan Cameron
> > <Jonathan.Cameron@huawei.com> wrote:  
> > >
> > > On Fri, 24 Jun 2022 11:48:47 +0100
> > > Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:    
> > > >
> > > > This seems to be missing code to advertise the new devices in the
> > > > device tree.    
> > >
> > > Intentionally. I am not aware of any current interest
> > > in defining DT support CXL or supporting it in operating systems.
> > > Easy enough to add if anyone does the leg work to figure out the
> > > bindings, but that needs to come from someone who cares and
> > > would need to be driven by OS support and a usecase. The ACPI
> > > stuff here is defined as part of the main CXL spec because the
> > > target class of machines simply doesn't generally use DT.    
> > 
> > I don't really want new devices in the virt board that aren't
> > usable in the common use case of "just pass a kernel with -kernel"...
> > 
> > -- PMM  
> 
> Ok.  In that case, what do you suggest?  
> 
> Options I can think of:
> 
> 1) I can come up with plausible DT bindings, but I'm not sure how
> that will be received by the kernel community, It will add a bunch of
> infrastructure to maintain that may be seen as useless at least in
> the short to medium term. Hence is not in anyone's test matrices etc.

Just occurred to me there is another barrier to an approach that adds
DT bindings.
I fairly sure hw/pci-bridge/pci_expander_bridge.c (PXB)
only works on ACPI platforms and is the only host bridge supported
for CXL emulation in QEMU.

> 
> Dan, how open would you be to adding DT support? We'd have to ignore
> some of the firmware query stuff like QTGs as there isn't an equivalent
> in DT - or we'd have to go as far as defining actual devices with
> mailboxes to query that info.
> 
> 2) Add it to something like the SBSA machine, but that brings a large
> burden in firmware etc and need to communicate everything via DT to
> EDK2 that is needed to build the ACPI tables in a flexible fashion +
> mass of EDK2 development.  Whilst the SBSA model is great for ARM
> specific stuff, requiring the large additional complexity in
> actually using it to test arch independent software is probably
> going to just mean it bit rots.
> 
> 3) Fork virt (obviously sharing as much as possible), potentially I
> guess that could be pretty light weight by declaring a new
> TypeInfo that is very nearly identical to virt with just the few extra
> calls inserted. 
> 
> Any other routes open to me to getting this support available?
> 
> Jonathan
> 
>