Re: [PATCH 0/2] rust: pci: expose is_virtfn() and reject VFs in nova-core

[John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>]

On 10/1/25 11:30 AM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 01, 2025 at 12:16:31PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
>> I think the question would be whether a "bare" VF really provides a
>> useful device for nova-core to bind to or if we're just picking it
>> up
> 
> It really should work, actual linux containers are my goto reason for
> people wanting to use VF's without a virtualization layer.

This is a solid use case, even though we don't yet have it for GPUs.

> 
>> fair bit of software emulation/virtualization in the host vGPU driver to
>> turn the VF into something that can work like a PF in the VM and I
>> don't know that we can require nova-core to make use of a VF without
>> that emulation/virtualization layer.  For example, aren't VRAM
>> allocations for a VF done as part of profiling the VF through the vGPU
>> host driver? 
> 
> The VF profiling should be designed to work without VFIO.

So we'll need to add some support to nova-core, in order for that to
happen. It's not there yet, of course.

> 
> It is was one thing to have the VFIO variant driver profile mediated
> devices that only it can create, but now that it is a generic VF
> without mediation it doesn't make sense anymore.
> 
> The question is how much mediation does the variant driver insert
> between the VM and the VF, and from what I can see that is mostly
> limited to config space..
> 
> IOW, I would expect nova-core on the PF has a way to profile and
> activate the VF to a usable state and then nova-core can run either
> through a vm or directly on the VF.
> 
> At least this is how all the NIC drivers have their SRIOV support
> designed today.
> 

OK, so I really like this design direction, and we can go in that 
direction.

However, I'd like to start with this tiny patchset first, because:

a) It's only one "if" statement to delete, when we decide to start
letting nova-core support VFs directly.

b) This series simplifies handling of VFs for the first use case,
which is vGPU running on VFIO.


thanks,
-- 
John Hubbard