+1 PCI Flavor.

From: Jiang, Yunhong [mailto:yunhong.ji...@intel.com]
Sent: January-10-14 1:56 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] [neutron] PCI pass-through network support

BTW, I like the PCI flavor :)

From: Jiang, Yunhong [mailto:yunhong.ji...@intel.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2014 10:41 PM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] [neutron] PCI pass-through network support

Hi, Ian, when you in aggrement with all of this, do you agree with the 'group 
name', or agree with John's pci flavor?
I'm against the PCI group and will send out a reply later.

--jyh

From: Ian Wells [mailto:ijw.ubu...@cack.org.uk]
Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2014 9:47 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] [neutron] PCI pass-through network support

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) 
<ba...@cisco.com<mailto:ba...@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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