[PATCH] amd iommu: force flush of iommu prior during shutdown

Eric W. Biederman ebiederm at xmission.com
Wed Mar 31 15:51:25 EDT 2010


Neil Horman <nhorman at tuxdriver.com> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:57:46AM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> Neil Horman <nhorman at tuxdriver.com> writes:
>> 
>> > On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:54:30AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
>> 
>> >> So this call amd_iommu_flush_all_devices() will be able to tell devices
>> >> that don't do any more DMAs and hence it is safe to reprogram iommu
>> >> mapping entries.
>> >> 
>> > It blocks the cpu until any pending DMA operations are complete.  Hmm, as I
>> > think about it, there is still a small possibility that a device like a NIC
>> > which has several buffers pre-dma-mapped could start a new dma before we
>> > completely disabled the iommu, althought thats small.  I never saw that in my
>> > testing, but hitting that would be fairly difficult I think, since its literally
>> > just a few hundred cycles between the flush and the actual hardware disable
>> > operation.
>> >
>> > According to this though:
>> > http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/34434-IOMMU-Rev_1.26_2-11-09.pdf
>> > That window could be closed fairly easily, but simply disabling read and write
>> > permissions for each device table entry prior to calling flush.  If we do that,
>> > then flush the device table, any subsequently started dma operation would just
>> > get noted in the error log, which we could ignore, since we're abot to boot to
>> > the kdump kernel anyway.
>> >
>> > Would you like me to respin w/ that modification?
>> 
>> Disabling permissions on all devices sounds good for the new virtualization
>> capable iommus.  I think older iommus will still be challenged.  I think
>> on x86 we have simply been able to avoid using those older iommus.
>> 
>> I like the direction you are going but please let's put this in a
>> paranoid iommu enable routine.
>> 
> You mean like initialize the device table so that all devices are default
> disabled on boot, and then selectively enable them (perhaps during a
> device_attach)?  I can give that a spin.

That sounds good.

Eric



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