Re: [PATCH net-next 0/2] Enable virtio to act as a master for a passthru device

On Tue, Jan 2, 2018 at 6:16 PM, Jakub Kicinski [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue,  2 Jan 2018 16:35:36 -0800, Sridhar Samudrala wrote:

quoted

This patch series enables virtio to switch over to a VF datapath when a VF
netdev is present with the same MAC address. It allows live migration of a VM
with a direct attached VF without the need to setup a bond/team between a
VF and virtio net device in the guest.

The hypervisor needs to unplug the VF device from the guest on the source
host and reset the MAC filter of the VF to initiate failover of datapath to
virtio before starting the migration. After the migration is completed, the
destination hypervisor sets the MAC filter on the VF and plugs it back to
the guest to switch over to VF datapath.

It is based on netvsc implementation and it may be possible to make this code
generic and move it to a common location that can be shared by netvsc and virtio.

This patch series is based on the discussion initiated by Jesse on this thread.
https://marc.info/?l=linux-virtualization&m=151189725224231&w=2

How does the notion of a device which is both a bond and a leg of a
bond fit with Alex's recent discussions about feature propagation?
Which propagation rules will apply to VirtIO master?  Meaning of the
flags on a software upper device may be different.  Why muddy the
architecture like this and not introduce a synthetic bond device?

It doesn't really fit with the notion I had. I think there may have
been a bit of a disconnect as I have been out for the last week or so
for the holidays.

My thought on this was that the feature bit should be spawning a new
para-virtual bond device and that bond should have the virto and the
VF as slaves. Also I thought there was some discussion about trying to
reuse as much of the netvsc code as possible for this so that we could
avoid duplication of effort and have the two drivers use the same
approach. It seems like it should be pretty straight forward since you
would have the feature bit in the case of virto, and netvsc just does
this sort of thing by default if I am not mistaken.

- Alex