[libvirt] [PATCH v4 05/10] Split reprobe action from the virPCIUnbindFromStub into a new function

[Laine Stump]

On 11/20/2015 11:58 AM, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> On Fri, 2015-11-20 at 11:33 -0500, Laine Stump wrote:
>> Seems safe, but is this really what we want to do? I haven't
>> read/understood the remaining patches yet, but this makes it sound like
>> what is going to happen is that all of the devices will be unbound from
>> vfio-pci immediately, so they are "in limbo", and will then be reprobed
>> once all devices are unused (and therefore unbound from vfio-pci).
>>
>> I think that may be a bit dangerous. Instead, we should leave the
>> devices bound to vfio-pci until all of them are unused, and at that
>> time, we should unbind them all from vfio-pci, then reprobe them all.
>> (again, I may have misunderstood the direction, if so ignore this).
> I agree, we should not unbind any device from vfio-pci until
> all the devices in the IOMMU group have been detached from
> the guest.

... and I've just looked back at my original comment about this in the 
BZ, and see that at that time I only suggested delaying the reprobe, but 
said nothing about delaying the unbind. And I'm not as sure about the 
necessity of waiting as I was 1/2 an hour ago. I suppose the issue is 
that it brings all those unbound devices one step closer to getting 
bound to the host driver. However, that will happen only if those 
device's PCI addresses are written to "drivers_reprobe" in sysfs (right? 
is there any other way a more "global" reprobe could happen and snatch 
up everything that's currently unbound?)

So maybe I'd better ask someone who knows more about this than me - 
Alex, is there an issue with unbinding some devices in an iommu group 
from vfio-pci at an earlier time, and leaving then unbound to any driver 
at all while some other devices in the group are still in use by the 
guest? Is there an advantage to keeping them all bound to vfio-pci until 
none of them are used, and then unbinding/reprobing them all at the same 
time? Or should we unbind each from vfio-pci immediately when they are 
detached from the guest, and reprobe them all once they're all unbound?

Sorry for waffling so much on this. It's just that going through the 
code in virpci.c makes my head hurt.