Re: [libvirt] [PATCH v3] PCI: Introduce new device binding path using pci_dev.driver_override

The driver_override field allows us to specify the driver for a device rather than relying on the driver to provide a positive match of the device. This shortcuts the existing process of looking up the vendor and device ID, adding them to the driver new_id, binding the device, then removing the ID, but it also provides a couple advantages. First, the above existing process allows the driver to bind to any device matching the new_id for the window where it's enabled. This is often not desired, such as the case of trying to bind a single device to a meta driver like pci-stub or vfio-pci. Using driver_override we can do this deterministically using: echo pci-stub > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:03:00.0/driver_override echo 0000:03:00.0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:03:00.0/driver/unbind echo 0000:03:00.0 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers_probe Previously we could not invoke drivers_probe after adding a device to new_id for a driver as we get non-deterministic behavior whether the driver we intend or the standard driver will claim the device. Now it becomes a deterministic process, only the driver matching driver_override will probe the device. To return the device to the standard driver, we simply clear the driver_override and reprobe the device: echo > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:03:00.0/driver_override echo 0000:03:00.0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:03:00.0/driver/unbind echo 0000:03:00.0 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers_probe Another advantage to this approach is that we can specify a driver override to force a specific binding or prevent any binding. For instance when an IOMMU group is exposed to userspace through VFIO we require that all devices within that group are owned by VFIO. However, devices can be hot-added into an IOMMU group, in which case we want to prevent the device from binding to any driver (override driver = "none") or perhaps have it automatically bind to vfio-pci. With driver_override it's a simple matter for this field to be set internally when the device is first discovered to prevent driver matches. Signed-off-by: Alex Williamson <alex.williamson(a)redhat.com&gt; Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh(a)linuxfoundation.org&gt;