[RFC 1/2] vfio/pci: keep the prefetchable attribute of a BAR region in VMA

[Shanker R Donthineni]

Hi Marc,

On 4/30/21 6:47 AM, Marc Zyngier wrote:
>
>>>> We've two concerns here:
>>>>    - Performance impacts for pass-through devices.
>>>>    - The definition of ioremap_wc() function doesn't match the host
>>>> kernel on ARM64
>>> Performance I can understand, but I think you're also using it to mask
>>> a driver bug which should be resolved first.  Thank
>> We’ve already instrumented the driver code and found the code path
>> for the unaligned accesses. We’ll fix this issue if it’s not
>> following WC semantics.
>>
>> Fixing the performance concern will be under KVM stage-2 page-table
>> control. We're looking for a guidance/solution for updating stage-2
>> PTE based on PCI-BAR attribute.
> Before we start discussing the *how*, I'd like to clearly understand
> what *arm64* memory attributes you are relying on. We already have
> established that the unaligned access was a bug, which was the biggest
> argument in favour of NORMAL_NC. What are the other requirements?
Sorry, my earlier response was not complete...

ARMv8 architecture has two features Gathering and Reorder transactions, very
important from a performance point of view. Small inline packets for NIC cards
and accesses to GPU's frame buffer are CPU-bound operations. We want to take
advantages of GRE features to achieve higher performance.

Both these features are disabled for prefetchable BARs in VM because memory-type
MT_DEVICE_nGnRE enforced in stage-2.
> Thanks,
>
>         M.
>
> --
> Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.