Re: [virtio-dev] Memory sharing device

["Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com>]

* Roman Kiryanov (rkir@google.com) wrote:
> Hi Gerd,
> 
> > virtio-gpu specifically needs that to support vulkan and opengl
> > extensions for coherent buffers, which must be allocated by the host gpu
> > driver.  It's WIP still.
> 

Hi Roman,

> the proposed spec says:
> 
> +Shared memory regions MUST NOT be used to control the operation
> +of the device, nor to stream data; those should still be performed
> +using virtqueues.

Yes, I put that in.

> Is there a strong reason to prohibit using memory regions for control purposes?
> Our long term goal is to have as few kernel drivers as possible and to move
> "drivers" into userspace. If we go with the virtqueues, is there
> general a purpose
> device/driver to talk between our host and guest to support custom hardware
> (with own blobs)? Could you please advise if we can use something else to
> achieve this goal?

My reason for that paragraph was to try and think about what should
still be in the virtqueues; after all a device that *just* shares a
block of memory and does everything in the block of memory itself isn't
really a virtio device - it's the standardised queue structure that
makes it a virtio device.
However, I'd be happy to accept the 'MUST NOT' might be a bit strong for
some cases where there's stuff that makes sense in the queues and
stuff that makes sense differently.

> I saw there were registers added, could you please elaborate how new address
> regions are added and associated with the host memory (and backwards)?

In virtio-fs we have two separate stages:
  a) A shared arena is setup (and that's what the spec Stefan pointed to is about) -
     it's statically allocated at device creation and corresponds to a chunk
     of guest physical address space

  b) During operation the guest kernel asks for files to be mapped into
     part of that arena dynamically, using commands sent over the queue
     - our queue carries FUSE commands, and we've added two new FUSE
     commands to perform the map/unmap.  They talk in terms of offsets
     within the shared arena, rather than GPAs.

So I'd tried to start by doing the spec for (a).

> We allocate a region from the guest first and pass its offset to the
> host to plug
> real RAM into it and then we mmap this offset:
> 
> https://photos.app.goo.gl/NJvPBvvFS3S3n9mn6

How do you transmit the glMapBufferRange command from QEMU driver to
host?

Dave

> Thank you.
> 
> Regards,
> Roman.
> 
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--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@redhat.com / Manchester, UK