* Daniel P. Berrangé ([email protected]) wrote: > On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 10:53:58AM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > > Hi, > > > > > I don't know what behavior should be if firmware tries to program > > > PCI64 hole beyond supported phys-bits. > > > > Well, you are basically f*cked. > > > > Unfortunately there is no reliable way to figure what phys-bits actually > > is. Because of that the firmware (both seabios and edk2) tries to place > > the pci64 hole as low as possible. > > > > The long version: > > > > qemu advertises phys-bits=40 to the guest by default. Probably because > > this is what the first amd opteron processors had, assuming that it > > would be a safe default. Then intel came, releasing processors with > > phys-bits=36, even recent (desktop-class) hardware has phys-bits=39. > > Boom. > > > > End result is that edk2 uses a 32G pci64 window by default, which is > > placed at the first 32G border beyond normal ram. So for virtual > > machines with up to ~ 30G ram (including reservations for memory > > hotplug) the pci64 hole covers 32G -> 64G in guest physical address > > space, which is low enough that it works on hardware with phys-bits=36. > > > > If your VM has more than 32G of memory the pci64 hole will move and > > phys-bits=36 isn't enough any more, but given that you probably only do > > that on more beefy hosts which can take >= 64G of RAM and have a larger > > physical address space this heuristic works good enough in practice. > > > > Changing phys-bits behavior has been discussed on and off since years. > > It's tricky to change for live migration compatibility reasons. > > > > We got the host-phys-bits and host-phys-bits-limit properties, which > > solve some of the phys-bits problems. > > > > * host-phys-bits=on makes sure the phys-bits advertised to the guest > > actually works. It's off by default though for backward > > compatibility reasons (except microvm). Also because turning it on > > breaks live migration of machines between hosts with different > > phys-bits. > > RHEL has shipped with host-phys-bits=on in its machine types > sinec RHEL-7. If it is good enough for RHEL machine types > for 8 years, IMHO, it is a sign that its reasonable to do the > same with upstream for new machine types.
And the upstream code is now pretty much identical except for the default; note that for TCG you do need to keep to 40 I think. Dave > > > * host-phys-bits-limit can be used to tweak phys-bits to > > be lower than what the host supports. Which can be used for > > live migration compatibility, i.e. if you have a pool of machines > > where some have 36 and some 39 you can limit phys-bits to 36 so > > live migration from 39 hosts to 36 hosts works. > > RHEL machine types have set this to host-phys-bits-limit=48 > since RHEL-8 days, to avoid accidentally enabling 5-level > paging in guests without explicit user opt-in. > > > What is missing: > > > > * Some way for the firmware to get a phys-bits value it can actually > > use. One possible way would be to have a paravirtual bit somewhere > > telling whenever host-phys-bits is enabled or not. > > > Regards, > Daniel > -- > |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| > |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| > |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :| > > -- Dr. David Alan Gilbert / [email protected] / Manchester, UK
