[libvirt] [question]Why libvirt bind all devices with same vendor id and device id to vfio-pci driver, and only unbind devices used by VMs to original driver?

[Laine Stump]

On 10/09/2017 10:57 AM, Alex Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Oct 2017 09:28:27 +0000
> "Wuzongyong (Euler Dept)" <cordius.wu at huawei.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> As the title says, I thought that it's a bit unreasonable and inconsistent  to unbind devices assigned to VMs to original driver
>> and leave other devices binding to vfio-pci driver.
>> Why not to bind devices we need to vfio-pci driver instead of bind all devices with same type to vfio-pci driver?
>> Or, we may can rebind devices unused with same type to original driver.
>
> Because that's the way the kernel's new_id interface works, any
> matching device without a driver will probe the new_id driver.  For a
> new enough kernel and libvirt, the driver_override interface should be
> used instead, which will only bind the target device.


Note that all libvirt 2.3.0 and later uses driver_override rather than
new_id (as long as the host kernel also supports it, which these days
should almost always be the case). If you're seeing *all* unbound
devices being bound to vfio-pci when only one of the devices is assigned
to a guest, then either 1) you are using a host with a *very* old
kernel, 2) you have modified libvirt's code to somehow force taking the
old/deprecated path, or 3) there is a bug in libvirt's code.