[PATCH v3 1/6] kvm: determine memory type from VMA
Jason Gunthorpe
jgg at nvidia.com
Sun Jul 16 15:30:23 PDT 2023
On Sun, Jul 16, 2023 at 08:09:02AM -0700, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> In terms of security for arm64 at least, Device vs Normal NC (or nc vs
> wc in Linux terminology) doesn't make much difference with the former
> occasionally being worse. The kernel would probably trust the DPDK code
> if it allows direct device access.
RDMA and DRM already allow device drivers to map WC to userspace on
demand, we expect the platform to support this.
> > So the userspace component needs to be responsible for selecting the
> > mapping, the same way using the PCI sysfs resource files today allows
> > to do that by selecting the _wc variant.
>
> I guess the sysfs interface is just trying to work around the VFIO
> limitations.
I think just nobody has ever asked for VFIO WC support. The main
non-VM user is DPDK and none of the NIC drivers have wanted this (DPDK
applications areis more of throughput than latency focused typically)
> > This is particularly suited for the case (which used to exist, I don't
> > know if it still does) where the buffer that wants write combining
> > reside in the same BAR as registers that otherwise don't.
>
> IIUC that's still the case for some devices (I think Jason mentioned
> some Mellanox cards).
Right, VFIO will have to allow it page-by-page
> I think this interface would help KVM when we'll need a cacheable
> mapping. For WC, we are ok without any VFIO changes.
Yes, it may be interesting to map cachable CXL memory as NORMAL_NC
into userspace for similar reasons.
Jason
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