[openstack-dev] [nova] [neutron] PCI pass-through network support

Ian Wells ijw.ubuntu at cack.org.uk
Thu Jan 9 17:47:19 UTC 2014


I think I'm in agreement with all of this.  Nice summary, Robert.

It may not be where the work ends, but if we could get this done the rest
is just refinement.


On 9 January 2014 17:49, Robert Li (baoli) <baoli at cisco.com> wrote:

>        Hi Folks,
>
>  With John joining the IRC, so far, we had a couple of productive
> meetings in an effort to come to consensus and move forward. Thanks John
> for doing that, and I appreciate everyone's effort to make it to the daily
> meeting. Let's reconvene on Monday.
>
>  But before that, and based on our today's conversation on IRC, I'd like
> to say a few things. I think that first of all, we need to get agreement on
> the terminologies that we are using so far. With the current nova PCI
> passthrough
>
>          PCI whitelist: defines all the available PCI passthrough devices
> on a compute node. pci_passthrough_whitelist=[{
> "vendor_id":"xxxx","product_id":"xxxx"}]
>         PCI Alias: criteria defined on the controller node with which
> requested PCI passthrough devices can be selected from all the PCI
> passthrough devices available in a cloud.
>                 Currently it has the following format: pci_alias={"vendor_id":"xxxx",
> "product_id":"xxxx", "name":"str"}
>
>         nova flavor extra_specs: request for PCI passthrough devices can
> be specified with extra_specs in the format for example:
> "pci_passthrough:alias"="name:count"
>
>  As you can see, currently a PCI alias has a name and is defined on the
> controller. The implications for it is that when matching it against the
> PCI devices, it has to match the vendor_id and product_id against all the
> available PCI devices until one is found. The name is only used for
> reference in the extra_specs. On the other hand, the whitelist is basically
> the same as the alias without a name.
>
>  What we have discussed so far is based on something called PCI groups
> (or PCI flavors as Yongli puts it). Without introducing other complexities,
> and with a little change of the above representation, we will have
> something like:
>
> pci_passthrough_whitelist=[{ "vendor_id":"xxxx","product_id":"xxxx",
> "name":"str"}]
>
>  By doing so, we eliminated the PCI alias. And we call the "name" in
> above as a PCI group name. You can think of it as combining the definitions
> of the existing whitelist and PCI alias. And believe it or not, a PCI group
> is actually a PCI alias. However, with that change of thinking, a lot of
> benefits can be harvested:
>
>           * the implementation is significantly simplified
>          * provisioning is simplified by eliminating the PCI alias
>          * a compute node only needs to report stats with something like:
> PCI group name:count. A compute node processes all the PCI passthrough
> devices against the whitelist, and assign a PCI group based on the
> whitelist definition.
>          * on the controller, we may only need to define the PCI group
> names. if we use a nova api to define PCI groups (could be private or
> public, for example), one potential benefit, among other things
> (validation, etc),  they can be owned by the tenant that creates them. And
> thus a wholesale of PCI passthrough devices is also possible.
>          * scheduler only works with PCI group names.
>          * request for PCI passthrough device is based on PCI-group
>          * deployers can provision the cloud based on the PCI groups
>          * Particularly for SRIOV, deployers can design SRIOV PCI groups
> based on network connectivities.
>
>  Further, to support SRIOV, we are saying that PCI group names not only
> can be used in the extra specs, it can also be used in the —nic option and
> the neutron commands. This allows the most flexibilities and
> functionalities afforded by SRIOV.
>
>  Further, we are saying that we can define default PCI groups based on
> the PCI device's class.
>
>  For vnic-type (or nic-type), we are saying that it defines the link
> characteristics of the nic that is attached to a VM: a nic that's connected
> to a virtual switch, a nic that is connected to a physical switch, or a nic
> that is connected to a physical switch, but has a host macvtap device in
> between. The actual names of the choices are not important here, and can be
> debated.
>
>  I'm hoping that we can go over the above on Monday. But any comments are
> welcome by email.
>
>  Thanks,
> Robert
>
>
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