VFIO and the Freescale Management Complex

This proposal has been accepted as a session.

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Accepted Session
60 Minute BoF
Scheduled: Thursday, October 16, 2014 from 4:30 – 5:30pm in Room 28

One Line Summary

The Freescale Management Complex (fsl-mc) is a new type of bus that requires VFIO support, and has some substantial differences from PCI and platform buses. This discussion presents an overview of the new bus and a proposal for how to integrate it with VFIO.

Abstract

The fsl-mc is a hardware resource manager that manages specialized hardware objects used in network-oriented packet processing applications. After the fsl-mc block is enabled, pools of hardware resources are available, such as queues, buffer poools, I/O interfaces. These resources are building blocks that can be used to create functional hardware objects such as network interfaces, crypto accelerator instances, or L2 switches.

All the fsl-mc managed hardware resources/objects are represented in a physical grouping mechanism called a ‘container’ or DPRC (data path resource container). From the point of view of an OS like Linux, a DPRC functions similar to a plug and play bus.

This session will present an overview of the fsl-mc architecture and a proposal for how it will fit into the vfio architecture including new APIs needed to deal with some substantial differences with this bus.

Tags

VFIO, IOMMU

Speakers

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