[libvirt-users] assigning PCI addresses with bus > 0x09

[Laine Stump]

On 1/3/19 5:22 AM, Riccardo Ravaioli wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Dec 2018 at 15:39, Laine Stump <laine at redhat.com 
> <mailto:laine at redhat.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I think you're right. Each bus requires some amount of IO space, and I
>     thought I recalled someone saying that all of the available IO space is
>     exhausted after 7 or 8 buses. [...]
> 
> 
> Laine,
> 
> Do you have by any chance a link to a page explaining this in more details?
> Thanks again! :)

No, sorry. There are mentions of it in bugzilla records (e.g. 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1067777 ) but all the info I 
have is just recalled from email and irc conversations over the last 3-4 
years. Basically the amount of IO address space is limited, and SeaBIOS 
allocates some minimum-sized chunk of that for each PCI controller that 
is probed and "seems to need IO address space for its devices". After 8 
or so controllers, all the space is used up.

You can avoid the IO address space limit if you're using a PCI Express 
based machinetype, *and* all PCIe devices, but you'll run up against 
different limits that need to be worked around in a different way - PCIe 
devices are required to be usable with no IO address space (and so QEMU 
specifically creates the PCIe controllers beyond pcie-root without any). 
But each PCIe controller only has a single slot (with 8 functions), each 
consumes a "bus number" and the bus number is an 8-bit value, so you're 
limited to 256 total (x8 if you don't need hotplug and don't mind 
manually assigning addresses).