Summary of LPC guest MSI discussion in Santa Fe

[Auger Eric]

Hi,

On 10/11/2016 00:59, Alex Williamson wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Nov 2016 23:38:50 +0000
> Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Nov 09, 2016 at 04:24:58PM -0700, Alex Williamson wrote:
>>> On Wed, 9 Nov 2016 22:25:22 +0000
>>> Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com> wrote:
>>>   
>>>> On Wed, Nov 09, 2016 at 03:17:09PM -0700, Alex Williamson wrote:  
>>>>> On Wed, 9 Nov 2016 20:31:45 +0000
>>>>> Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com> wrote:    
>>>>>> On Wed, Nov 09, 2016 at 08:23:03PM +0100, Christoffer Dall wrote:    
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> (I suppose it's technically possible to get around this issue by letting
>>>>>>> QEMU place RAM wherever it wants but tell the guest to never use a
>>>>>>> particular subset of its RAM for DMA, because that would conflict with
>>>>>>> the doorbell IOVA or be seen as p2p transactions.  But I think we all
>>>>>>> probably agree that it's a disgusting idea.)      
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Disgusting, yes, but Ben's idea of hotplugging on the host controller with
>>>>>> firmware tables describing the reserved regions is something that we could
>>>>>> do in the distant future. In the meantime, I don't think that VFIO should
>>>>>> explicitly reject overlapping mappings if userspace asks for them.    
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm confused by the last sentence here, rejecting user mappings that
>>>>> overlap reserved ranges, such as MSI doorbell pages, is exactly how
>>>>> we'd reject hot-adding a device when we meet such a conflict.  If we
>>>>> don't reject such a mapping, we're knowingly creating a situation that
>>>>> potentially leads to data loss.  Minimally, QEMU would need to know
>>>>> about the reserved region, map around it through VFIO, and take
>>>>> responsibility (somehow) for making sure that region is never used for
>>>>> DMA.  Thanks,    
>>>>
>>>> Yes, but my point is that it should be up to QEMU to abort the hotplug, not
>>>> the host kernel, since there may be ways in which a guest can tolerate the
>>>> overlapping region (e.g. by avoiding that range of memory for DMA).  
>>>
>>> The VFIO_IOMMU_MAP_DMA ioctl is a contract, the user ask to map a range
>>> of IOVAs to a range of virtual addresses for a given device.  If VFIO
>>> cannot reasonably fulfill that contract, it must fail.  It's up to QEMU
>>> how to manage the hotplug and what memory regions it asks VFIO to map
>>> for a device, but VFIO must reject mappings that it (or the SMMU by
>>> virtue of using the IOMMU API) know to overlap reserved ranges.  So I
>>> still disagree with the referenced statement.  Thanks,  
>>
>> I think that's a pity. Not only does it mean that both QEMU and the kernel
>> have more work to do (the former has to carve up its mapping requests,
>> whilst the latter has to check that it is indeed doing this), but it also
>> precludes the use of hugepage mappings on the IOMMU because of reserved
>> regions. For example, a 4k hole someplace may mean we can't put down 1GB
>> table entries for the guest memory in the SMMU.
>>
>> All this seems to do is add complexity and decrease performance. For what?
>> QEMU has to go read the reserved regions from someplace anyway. It's also
>> the way that VFIO works *today* on arm64 wrt reserved regions, it just has
>> no way to identify those holes at present.
> 
> Sure, that sucks, but how is the alternative even an option?  The user
> asked to map something, we can't, if we allow that to happen now it's a
> bug.  Put the MSI doorbells somewhere that this won't be an issue.  If
> the platform has it fixed somewhere that this is an issue, don't use
> that platform.  The correctness of the interface is more important than
> catering to a poorly designed system layout IMO.  Thanks,

Besides above problematic, I started to prototype the sysfs API. A first
issue I face is the reserved regions become global to the iommu instead
of characterizing the iommu_domain, ie. the "reserved_regions" attribute
file sits below an iommu instance (~
/sys/class/iommu/dmar0/intel-iommu/reserved_regions ||
/sys/class/iommu/arm-smmu0/arm-smmu/reserved_regions).

MSI reserved window can be considered global to the IOMMU. However PCIe
host bridge P2P regions rather are per iommu-domain.

Do you confirm the attribute file should contain both global reserved
regions and all per iommu_domain reserved regions?

Thoughts?

Thanks

Eric
> 
> Alex
> 
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