Re: RFC: use VFIO over a UNIX domain socket to implement device offloading

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Fri, May 01, 2020 at 03:01:01PM +0000, Felipe Franciosi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > On Apr 30, 2020, at 4:20 PM, Thanos Makatos <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> >>>> More importantly, considering:
> >>>> a) Marc-André's comments about data alignment etc., and
> >>>> b) the possibility to run the server on another guest or host,
> >>>> we won't be able to use native VFIO types. If we do want to support that
> >>>> then
> >>>> we'll have to redefine all data formats, similar to
> >>>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-
> >>>> 3A__github.com_qemu_qemu_blob_master_docs_interop_vhost-
> >>>> 
> >> 2Duser.rst&d=DwIFAw&c=s883GpUCOChKOHiocYtGcg&r=XTpYsh5Ps2zJvtw6
> >>>> 
> >> ogtti46atk736SI4vgsJiUKIyDE&m=lJC7YeMMsAaVsr99tmTYncQdjEfOXiJQkRkJ
> >>>> W7NMgRg&s=1d_kB7VWQ-
> >> 8d4t6Ikga5KSVwws4vwiVMvTyWVaS6PRU&e= .
> >>>> 
> >>>> So the protocol will be more like an enhanced version of the Vhost-user
> >>>> protocol
> >>>> than VFIO. I'm fine with either direction (VFIO vs. enhanced Vhost-user),
> >>>> so we need to decide before proceeding as the request format is
> >>>> substantially
> >>>> different.
> >>> 
> >>> Regarding the ability to use the protocol on non-AF_UNIX sockets, we can
> >>> support this future use case without unnecessarily complicating the
> >> protocol by
> >>> defining the C structs and stating that data alignment and endianness for
> >> the
> >>> non AF_UNIX case must be the one used by GCC on a x86_64 bit machine,
> >> or can
> >>> be overridden as required.
> >> 
> >> Defining it to be x86_64 semantics is effectively saying "we're not going
> >> to do anything and it is up to other arch maintainers to fix the inevitable
> >> portability problems that arise".
> > 
> > Pretty much.
> > 
> >> Since this is a new protocol should we take the opportunity to model it
> >> explicitly in some common standard RPC protocol language. This would have
> >> the benefit of allowing implementors to use off the shelf APIs for their
> >> wire protocol marshalling, and eliminate questions about endianness and
> >> alignment across architectures.
> > 
> > The problem is that we haven't defined the scope very well. My initial 
> > impression 
> > was that we should use the existing VFIO structs and constants, however 
> > that's 
> > impossible if we're to support non AF_UNIX. We need consensus on this, 
> > we're 
> > open to ideas how to do this.
> 
> Thanos has a point.
> 
> From https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/MultiProcessQEMU, which I believe
> was written by Stefan, I read:
> 
> > Inventing a new device emulation protocol from scratch has many
> > disadvantages. VFIO could be used as the protocol to avoid reinventing
> > the wheel ...
> 
> At the same time, this appears to be incompatible with the (new?)
> requirement of supporting device emulation which may run in non-VFIO
> compliant OSs or even across OSs (ie. via TCP or similar).

To be clear, I don't have any opinion on whether we need to support
cross-OS/TCP or not.

I'm merely saying that if we do decide to support cross-OS/TCP, then
I think we need a more explicitly modelled protocol, instead of relying
on serialization of C structs.

There could be benefits to an explicitly modelled protocol, even for
local only usage, if we want to more easily support non-C languages
doing serialization, but again I don't have a strong opinion on whether
that's neccessary to worry about or not.

So I guess largely the question boils down to setting the scope of
what we want to be able to achieve in terms of RPC endpoints.

Regards,
Daniel
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