[Intel-wired-lan] [PATCH 0/2] igb/ixgbe: Fix ordering of SR-IOV teardown

[David Miller]

From: Alex Williamson <alex.williamson at redhat.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 17:18:28 -0600

> When running a Windows 2012 R2 guest with a pair of VFs assigned
> through vfio-pci, we run into a problem trying to hot-unplug those VFs
> after the PF has unregistered the netdev.  This is a common scenario
> if the PF is unbound from the driver while VFs are active.  In the
> case of igb, the resulting guest behavior differs slightly between the
> Microsoft provided and Intel add-on guest drivers.  With the Microsoft
> driver, the guest seems to stumble through ejecting both VFs, but
> takes longer than normal to do so.  With the Intel drivers, only one
> VF is unplugged, but Device Manager still shows it as present.  The
> second VF is non-functional but also still shown in Device Manager.
> At this point, the guest is in such a state that it will not cleanly
> shutdown.  With ixgbe VFs, both the Microsoft and Intel drivers take
> on this latter behavior.
> 
> For both, I've found that disabling SR-IOV before unregistering the PF
> netdev device allows the hot-unplug to proceed without interruption or
> further ill behavior in the guest.  This is true regardless of which
> driver is used.  I don't fully understand what dependency is broken
> by unregistering the netdev prior to disabling SR-IOV, but I also
> don't see the benefit in delaying SR-IOV teardown in this call path.
> It could potentially be moved even earlier, but I'll let those more
> familiar with the hardware and code make that determination.  In any
> case, the VM behavior is substantially improved by this slight
> re-ordering.
> 
> I don't have an i40e for testing, but it already appears to disable
> SR-IOV much earlier in the unbind path, so I wouldn't expect to find
> similar issues.  Thanks,

Patch #2 does not apply cleanly, please respin this series against
my 'net' GIT tree, thanks.