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<div>Hi,</div>
<div> One use case was brought up in today's meeting that I think is not valid.</div>
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<div>It is the use case where all 3 vnic types : Virtio, direct and macvtap (the terms used in the meeting were slow, fast, faster/foobar) could be attached to the same VM. The main difference between a direct and macvtap interface is that the former does
not support live migration. So, attaching both direct and macvtap pci-passthrough interfaces to the same VM would mean that it cannot support live migration. In that case assigning the macvtap interface is in essence a waste. </div>
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<div>So, it would be ideal to disallow such an assignment or at least warn the user that the VM will now not be able to support live migration. We can however still combine direct or macvtap pci-passthrough interfaces with virtio vmic types without issue.</div>
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<div>Thanks,</div>
<div>Sandhya</div>
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<span style="font-weight:bold">From: </span>Ian Wells <<a href="mailto:ijw.ubuntu@cack.org.uk">ijw.ubuntu@cack.org.uk</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Reply-To: </span>"OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)" <<a href="mailto:openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org">openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Date: </span>Thursday, January 9, 2014 12:47 PM<br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">To: </span>"OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)" <<a href="mailto:openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org">openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Subject: </span>Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] [neutron] PCI pass-through network support<br>
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<div>I think I'm in agreement with all of this. Nice summary, Robert.<br>
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It may not be where the work ends, but if we could get this done the rest is just refinement.<br>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On 9 January 2014 17:49, Robert Li (baoli) <span dir="ltr">
<<a href="mailto:baoli@cisco.com" target="_blank">baoli@cisco.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; ">Hi Folks,</span></p>
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<div>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. </div>
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<div>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</div>
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<div> PCI whitelist: defines all the available PCI passthrough devices on a compute node. <span style="background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Monaco, Menlo, Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap; ">pci_passthrough_whitelist=[{
"vendor_id":"xxxx","product_id":"xxxx"}] </span></div>
<div> 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. </div>
<div> Currently it has the following format: <span style="background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Monaco, Menlo, Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap; ">pci_alias={"vendor_id":"xxxx",
"product_id":"xxxx", "name":"str"}</span></div>
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<div> nova flavor extra_specs: request for PCI passthrough devices can be specified with extra_specs in the format for example:<span style="background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Monaco, Menlo, Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap; ">"pci_passthrough:alias"="name:count"</span></div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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:</div>
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<div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Monaco, Menlo, Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); ">pci_passthrough_whitelist=[{ "vendor_id":"xxxx","product_id":"xxxx",
"name":"str"}] </span></div>
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<div>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:</div>
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<div> * the implementation is significantly simplified</div>
<div> * provisioning is simplified by eliminating the PCI alias</div>
<div> * 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.</div>
<div> * 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.</div>
<div> * scheduler only works with PCI group names. </div>
<div> * request for PCI passthrough device is based on PCI-group</div>
<div> * deployers can provision the cloud based on the PCI groups</div>
<div> * Particularly for SRIOV, deployers can design SRIOV PCI groups based on network connectivities.</div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>Further, we are saying that we can define default PCI groups based on the PCI device's class.</div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>I'm hoping that we can go over the above on Monday. But any comments are welcome by email.</div>
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<div>Thanks,</div>
<div>Robert</div>
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