Generic PCI Express to PCI Bridge
================================
Description
===========
PCIE-to-PCI bridge is a new method for legacy PCI
hierarchies creation on Q35 machines.
Previously Intel DMI-to-PCI bridge was used for this purpose.
But due to its strict limitations - no support of hot-plug,
no cross-platform and cross-architecture support - a new generic
PCIE-to-PCI bridge should now be used for any legacy PCI device usage
with PCI Express machine.
This generic PCIE-PCI bridge is a cross-platform device,
can be hot-plugged into appropriate root port (requires additional actions,
see 'PCIE-PCI bridge hot-plug' section),
and supports devices hot-plug into the bridge itself
(with some limitations, see below).
Hot-plug of legacy PCI devices into the bridge
is provided by bridge's built-in Standard hot-plug Controller.
Though it still has some limitations, see below.
PCIE-PCI bridge hot-plug
=======================
Guest OSes require extra efforts to enable PCIE-PCI bridge hot-plug.
Motivation - now on init any PCI Express root port which doesn't have
any device plugged in, has no free buses reserved to provide any of them
to a hot-plugged devices in future.
To solve this problem we reserve additional buses on a firmware level.
Currently only SeaBIOS is supported.
The way of bus number to reserve delivery is special
Red Hat vendor-specific PCI capability, added to the root port
that is planned to have PCIE-PCI bridge hot-plugged in.
Capability layout (defined in include/hw/pci/pci_bridge.h):
uint8_t id; Standard PCI capability header field
uint8_t next; Standard PCI capability header field
uint8_t len; Standard PCI vendor-specific capability header field
uint8_t type; Red Hat vendor-specific capability type
List of currently existing types:
RESOURCE_RESERVE = 1
uint32_t bus_res; Minimum number of buses to reserve
uint64_t io; IO space to reserve
uint32_t mem Non-prefetchable memory to reserve
At most one of the following two fields may be set to a value
different from -1:
uint32_t mem_pref_32; Prefetchable memory to reserve (32-bit MMIO)
uint64_t mem_pref_64; Prefetchable memory to reserve (64-bit MMIO)
If any reservation field is -1 then this kind of reservation is not
needed and must be ignored by firmware.
At the moment this capability is used only in QEMU generic PCIe root port
(-device pcie-root-port). Capability construction function takes all reservation
fields values from corresponding device properties. By default all of them are
set to -1 to leave root port's default behavior unchanged.
Usage
=====
A detailed command line would be:
[qemu-bin + storage options] \
-m 2G \
-device pcie-root-port,bus=pcie.0,id=rp1,slot=1 \
-device pcie-root-port,bus=pcie.0,id=rp2,slot=2 \
-device pcie-root-port,bus=pcie.0,id=rp3,slot=3,bus-reserve=1 \
-device pcie-pci-bridge,id=br1,bus=rp1 \
-device pcie-pci-bridge,id=br2,bus=rp2 \
-device e1000,bus=br1,addr=8
Then in monitor it's OK to execute next commands:
device_add pcie-pci-bridge,id=br3,bus=rp3 \
device_add e1000,bus=br2,addr=1 \
device_add e1000,bus=br3,addr=1
Here you have:
(1) Cold-plugged:
- Root ports: 1 QEMU generic root port with the capability mentioned above,
2 QEMU generic root ports without this capability;
- 2 PCIE-PCI bridges plugged into 2 different root ports;
- e1000 plugged into the first bridge.
(2) Hot-plugged:
- PCIE-PCI bridge, plugged into QEMU generic root port;
- 2 e1000 cards, one plugged into the cold-plugged PCIE-PCI bridge,
another plugged into the hot-plugged bridge.
Limitations
===========
The PCIE-PCI bridge can be hot-plugged only into pcie-root-port that
has proper 'bus-reserve' property value to provide secondary bus for the
hot-plugged bridge.
Windows 7 and older versions don't support hot-plug devices into the PCIE-PCI bridge.
To enable device hot-plug into the bridge on Linux there're 3 ways:
1) Build shpchp module with this patch http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-pci/msg63052.html
2) Use kernel 4.14+ where the patch mentioned above is already merged.
3) Set 'msi' property to off - this forces the bridge to use legacy INTx,
which allows the bridge to notify the OS about hot-plug event without having
BUSMASTER set.
Implementation
==============
The PCIE-PCI bridge is based on PCI-PCI bridge, but also accumulates PCI Express
features as a PCI Express device.
