Re: [PATCH v7 02/23] KVM: Make device name configurable

On Thu, Sep 03, 2026, Steffen Eiden wrote:

On Wed, Sep 02, 2026 at 09:14:21AM -0700, Sean Christopherson wrote:

quoted

And taking things a few steps further, we can solve the MMIO issue in a more
elegant way, and eliminate the runtime string building in this patch (after looking
more closely, that code needs to be jettisoned no matter what, there's simply no
reason to specify the names at runtime since they're separate compilation units).

Rather than splatter #defines throughout header files, deal with the bulk of the
pain in Makefile.kvm.  By feeding conditionals into Makefile.kvm, the s390+arm64
build can easily omit coalesced_mmio.o and async_pf.o, define __KVM_HAVE_ARCH_MMIO
programatically without having to change other architectures, and solve the naming
stuff.

Yes, this is a great idea. Thank you. I second you, this looks more clean
and stable than the stuff we came up with :) 

Looking more at arch/s390/kvm/Kconfig and virt/kvm/Kconfig, we might need/want to
to build out infrastructure to handle this sort of thing in a more generic fashion?

Which probably isn't that much infrastructure?  It's more just changing how arch
code communicates with common KVM?  I.e. instead of providing boolean configs in
virt/kvm/Kconfig, formalize communicating HAVE-type macros through the Makefile.
That might even be a net positive in the long run, as it will make it easier to
provide defaults for the common cases.

I say that because unless there's magic I'm unaware of these Kconfigs also needs
to be configured per-KVM, not per-kernel:

  - KVM_MMU_LOCKLESS_AGING, otherwise aging on arm64 will unintentionally be done
    outside of mmu_lock.

  - KVM_GENERIC_PRE_FAULT_MEMORY, so that arm64 doesn't need to provide a stub
    for something it doesn't support

  - HAVE_KVM_MSI, because presumably it's needed for arm64 support.

  - HAVE_KVM_READONLY_MEM, same story as HAVE_KVM_MSI.

Which isn't _that_ many knobs, but add in KVM_MMIO, KVM_ASYNC_PF, and
KVM_ASYNC_PF_SYNC, and it's enough that I think we should think about the big
picture and not play whack-a-mole.

Actually, thinking about this more, what I've proposed here, plus the pattern of
#define-ing macros in arch-specific kvm_host.h files, should suffice.  For things
like __KVM_HAVE_ARCH_VM_FREE, it absolutely makes sense to #define the macro in
kvm_host.h since it's very directly tied to an arch callback.  Whereas with KVM_MIO
and KVM_ASYNC_PF, because they enable compilation of C files, it makes sense to
define them in Makefiles.

So I think the "gap" is purely that the four knobs listed above need handling
(and arguably KVM_MMU_LOCKLESS_AGING is ok as-proposed).  But I do think we should
try our best to be more thoughtful than we usually are when deciding how to enable
common code, because obviously s390+arm64 is adding wrinkles no one has had to deal
with before.