[mgerdts]

> is needed only if you intend to hot-plug devices that were not present in the first enumeration

Correct. I regularly use VMs with more that 14 statically configured PCI devices using QEMU with libvirt without having to resort to qemu:cmdline.

[dottedmag]

Author here.

Have you got it working with PCI or PCIe? PCI devices attached to the top-level bus do not request I/O ports unless they need to, and if they do, they request only small slice.

QEMU also allows one to put 8 static PCIe devices into a single "multifunction PCIe device", so it requests 4K I/O ports per 8 devices, giving a bigger headroom. The downside, of course, is that all these 8 devices lose individual hotpluggability, and can only be added/removed en masse.

The biggest problem is hotplug slots, each taking 4K I/O ports unless told otherwise in a way libvirt does not support as I described in the article.

[mgerdts]

There are 14 hardware based PCIe devices (mixture of NVME drives and NIC VFs) along with various other emulated PCI devices (virtio block, serial, etc.).

I have not tried to hot [un]plug devices with this configuration. It looks as though I’m likely to be disappointed if I try. Thanks for the explanation.