docs: document dom0less + PV drivers

Document how to use the feature and how the implementation works.

Signed-off-by: Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xilinx.com>
Reviewed-by: Luca Fancellu <luca.fancellu@arm.com>
Acked-by: Julien Grall <jgrall@amazon.com>
This commit is contained in:
Stefano Stabellini authored and Julien Grall committed 2022-07-20 19:06:33 +01:00
1 parent 6fe2e39a02
commit 52196c8cd9
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@@ -90,6 +90,46 @@ Otherwise, they may be unusable in Xen (for instance if they are compressed).
See docs/misc/arm/device-tree/booting.txt for more information.
PV Drivers
----------
It is possible to use PV drivers with dom0less guests with some
restrictions:
- dom0less domUs that want to use PV drivers support should have the
"xen,enhanced" property set under their device tree nodes (see
docs/misc/arm/device-tree/booting.txt)
- a dom0 must be present (or another domain with enough privileges to
run the toolstack)
- after dom0 is booted, the utility "init-dom0less" must be run
- do not run "init-dom0less" while creating other guests with xl
After the execution of init-dom0less, it is possible to use "xl" to
hotplug PV drivers to dom0less guests. E.g. xl network-attach domU.
The implementation works as follows:
- Xen allocates the xenstore event channel for each dom0less domU that
has the "xen,enhanced" property, and sets HVM_PARAM_STORE_EVTCHN
- Xen does *not* allocate the xenstore page and sets HVM_PARAM_STORE_PFN
to ~0ULL (invalid)
- Dom0less domU kernels check that HVM_PARAM_STORE_PFN is set to invalid
- Old kernels will continue without xenstore support (Note: some old
buggy kernels might crash because they don't check the validity of
HVM_PARAM_STORE_PFN before using it! Disable "xen,enhanced" in
those cases)
- New kernels will wait for a notification on the xenstore event
channel (HVM_PARAM_STORE_EVTCHN) before continuing with the
initialization
- Once dom0 is booted, init-dom0less is executed:
- it allocates the xenstore shared page and sets HVM_PARAM_STORE_PFN
- it calls xs_introduce_domain
- Xenstored notices the new domain, initializes interfaces as usual, and
sends an event channel notification to the domain using the xenstore
event channel (HVM_PARAM_STORE_EVTCHN)
- The Linux domU kernel receives the event channel notification, checks
HVM_PARAM_STORE_PFN again and continue with the initialization
Limitations
-----------
@@ -107,9 +147,6 @@ limitations:
information, the GIC version exposed to the domains started by Xen at
boot is the same as the native GIC version.
- No PV drivers. There is no support for PV devices at the moment. All
devices need to be statically assigned to guests.
- Pinning vCPUs of domains started by Xen at boot can be
done from the control domain, using `xl vcpu-pin` as usual. It is not
currently possible to configure vCPU pinning without a control domain.
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