These quirks are necessary for GeForce, but not for Quadro/GRID/Tesla
assignment. Leaving them enabled is fully functional and provides the
most compatibility, but due to the unique NVIDIA MSI ACK behavior[1],
it also introduces latency in re-triggering the MSI interrupt. This
overhead is typically negligible, but has been shown to adversely
affect some (very) high interrupt rate applications. This adds the
vfio-pci device option "x-no-geforce-quirks=" which can be set to
"on" to disable this additional overhead.
A follow-on optimization for GeForce might be to make use of an
ioeventfd to allow KVM to trigger an irqfd in the kernel vfio-pci
driver, avoiding the bounce through userspace to handle this device
write.
[1] Background: the NVIDIA driver has been observed to issue a write
to the MMIO mirror of PCI config space in BAR0 in order to allow the
MSI interrupt for the device to retrigger. Older reports indicated a
write of 0xff to the (read-only) MSI capability ID register, while
more recently a write of 0x0 is observed at config space offset 0x704,
non-architected, extended config space of the device (BAR0 offset
0x88704). Virtualization of this range is only required for GeForce.
Signed-off-by: Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>
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