Hi Patrick,

Can you provide the grub settings? Is iommu.passthrough=1 included?

Also, is qat_c62xvf loaded as well?

Finally, a few guidelines on the vfio driver:
At times, we need to configure the vfio driver.
On kernel vers. 5.9+ we need to load the vfio-pci driver with the additional parameter disable_denylist=1
Unload the vfio-pci driver if it is already loaded so that we can reload it with the correct parameters :
sudo modprobe -r vfio_iommu_type1; sudo modprobe -r vfio_pci; sudo modprobe -r vfio_virqfd; sudo modprobe -r vfio
If you can't unload the vfio driver because it's been built into the kernel, you'll have to find another way to change VFIO parameters, or to rebuild your kernel with VFIO_PCI set as a module. Failing to do that, you might encounter issues later on when you try to bind the VFs to VFIO.

Load the vfio-pci driver and bind it to QAT VFs device ids:
sudo modprobe vfio-pci disable_denylist=1 enable_sriov=1 vfio-pci.ids=8086:37c9

Enable no-iommu-mode:
echo "1" | sudo tee /sys/module/vfio/parameters/enable_unsafe_noiommu_mode
 /sys/module/vfio/parameter is missing ?
If /sys/module/vfio/parameters does not exist, you might be missing the kernel module VFIO_NOIOMMU

Automatically set VFIO params on boot
It's possible to set these parameters automatically on boot by creating a /etc/modprobe.d/vfio-pci.conf file with the parameters :
cat /etc/modprobe.d/vfio-pci.conf
options vfio enable_unsafe_noiommu_mode=1
options vfio-pci disable_denylist=1 enable_sriov=1 vfio-pci.ids=8086:37c9

We haven’t encountered this issue in the past, so just making sure the configuration is correct. I don’t think having the driver static/loadable should make a difference, I will try with building statically on my setup.

Thank you!


From: Patrick Robb <probb@iol.unh.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 9, 2023 9:29 PM
To: Ruifeng Wang <Ruifeng.Wang@arm.com>
Cc: Juraj Linkeš <juraj.linkes@pantheon.tech>; Dharmik Jayesh Thakkar <DharmikJayesh.Thakkar@arm.com>; Honnappa Nagarahalli <Honnappa.Nagarahalli@arm.com>; ci@dpdk.org; nd <nd@arm.com>
Subject: Re: Intel QAT 8970 accel card on ARM Ampere Server

Also I am just now thinking I probably should have provided dpdk-devbind.py output:

probb@arm-ampere-dut:/tmp/dpdk/usertools$ dpdk-devbind.py --status
Crypto devices using kernel driver
==================================
0000:03:00.0 'C62x Chipset QuickAssist Technology 37c8' drv=c6xx unused=vfio-pci
0000:04:00.0 'C62x Chipset QuickAssist Technology 37c8' drv=c6xx unused=vfio-pci
0000:05:00.0 'C62x Chipset QuickAssist Technology 37c8' drv=c6xx unused=vfio-pci
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