Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] drivers: gpio: add virtio-gpio guest driver

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 07.12.20 04:48, Jason Wang wrote:

Hi,

>>> Not a native speaker but event sounds like something driver read from
>>> device. Looking at the below lists, most of them except for
>>> VIRTIO_GPIO_EV_HOST_LEVEL looks more like a command.
>> okay, shall I name it "message" ?
> 
> 
> It might be better.

Okay, renamed to messages in v3.

>>> #define VIRTIO_NET_OK     0
>>> #define VIRTIO_NET_ERR    1
>> hmm, so I'd need to define all the error codes that possibly could
>> happen ?
> 
> 
> Yes, I think you need.

Okay, going to do it in the next version.

>>> If I read the code correctly, this expects there will be at most a
>>> single type of event that can be processed at the same time. E.g can
>>> upper layer want to read from different lines in parallel? If yes, we
>>> need to deal with that.
>> @Linus @Bartosz: can that happen or does gpio subsys already serialize
>> requests ?
>>
>> Initially, I tried to protect it by spinlock (so, only one request may
>> run at a time, other calls just wait until the first is finished), but
>> it crashed when gpio cdev registration calls into the driver (fetches
>> the status) while still in bootup.
>>
>> Don't recall the exact error anymore, but something like an
>> inconsistency in the spinlock calls.
>>
>> Did I just use the wrong type of lock ?
> 
> I'm not sure since I am not familiar with GPIO. But a question is, if at
> most one request is allowed, I'm not sure virtio is the best choice here
> since we don't even need a queue(virtqueue) here.

I guess, I should add locks to the gpio callback functions (where gpio
subsys calls in). That way, requests are requests are strictly ordered.
The locks didn't work in my previous attempts, but probably because I've
missed to set the can_sleep flag (now fixed in v3).

The gpio ops are already waiting for reply of the corresponding type, so
the only bad thing that could happen is the same operation being called
twice (when coming from different threads) and replies mixed up between
first and second one. OTOH I don't see much problem w/ that. This can be
fixed by adding a global lock.

> I think it's still about whether or not we need allow a batch of
> requests via a queue. Consider you've submitted two request A and B, and
> if B is done first, current code won't work. This is because, the reply
> is transported via rxq buffers not just reuse the txq buffer if I read
> the code correctly.

Meanwhile I've changed it to allocate a new rx buffer for the reply
(done right before the request is sent), so everything should be
processed in the order it had been sent. Assuming virtio keeps the
order of the buffers in the queues.

>> Could you please give an example how bi-directional transmission within
>> the same queue could look like ?
> 
> You can check how virtio-blk did this in:
> 
> https://docs.oasis-open.org/virtio/virtio/v1.1/csprd01/virtio-v1.1-csprd01.html#x1-2500006

hmm, still don't see how the code would actually look like. (in qemu as
well as kernel). Just add the fetched inbuf as an outbuf (within the
same queue) ?

>> Maybe add one new buffer per request and one new per received async
>> signal ?
> 
> It would be safe to fill the whole rxq and do the refill e.g when half
> of the queue is used.

Okay, doing that now in v3: there's always at least one rx buffer,
and requests as well as the intr receiver always add a new one.
(they get removed on fetching, IMHO).


--mtx

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Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
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