RE: [RFC] /dev/ioasid uAPI proposal

["Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@intel.com>]

> From: Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 2, 2021 6:22 AM
> 
> On Tue, 1 Jun 2021 07:01:57 +0000
> "Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > I summarized five opens here, about:
> >
> > 1)  Finalizing the name to replace /dev/ioasid;
> > 2)  Whether one device is allowed to bind to multiple IOASID fd's;
> > 3)  Carry device information in invalidation/fault reporting uAPI;
> > 4)  What should/could be specified when allocating an IOASID;
> > 5)  The protocol between vfio group and kvm;
> >
> ...
> >
> > For 5), I'd expect Alex to chime in. Per my understanding looks the
> > original purpose of this protocol is not about I/O address space. It's
> > for KVM to know whether any device is assigned to this VM and then
> > do something special (e.g. posted interrupt, EPT cache attribute, etc.).
> 
> Right, the original use case was for KVM to determine whether it needs
> to emulate invlpg, so it needs to be aware when an assigned device is

invlpg -> wbinvd :)

> present and be able to test if DMA for that device is cache coherent.
> The user, QEMU, creates a KVM "pseudo" device representing the vfio
> group, providing the file descriptor of that group to show ownership.
> The ugly symbol_get code is to avoid hard module dependencies, ie. the
> kvm module should not pull in or require the vfio module, but vfio will
> be present if attempting to register this device.

so the symbol_get thing is not about the protocol itself. Whatever protocol
is defined, as long as kvm needs to call vfio or ioasid helper function, we 
need define a proper way to do it. Jason, what's your opinion of alternative 
option since you dislike symbol_get?

> 
> With kvmgt, the interface also became a way to register the kvm pointer
> with vfio for the translation mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
> 
> The PPC/SPAPR support allows KVM to associate a vfio group to an IOMMU
> page table so that it can handle iotlb programming from pre-registered
> memory without trapping out to userspace.
> 
> > Because KVM deduces some policy based on the fact of assigned device,
> > it needs to hold a reference to related vfio group. this part is irrelevant
> > to this RFC.
> 
> All of these use cases are related to the IOMMU, whether DMA is
> coherent, translating device IOVA to GPA, and an acceleration path to
> emulate IOMMU programming in kernel... they seem pretty relevant.

One open is whether kvm should hold a device reference or IOASID
reference. For DMA coherence, it only matters whether assigned 
devices are coherent or not (not for a specific address space). For kvmgt, 
it is for recoding kvm pointer in mdev driver to do write protection. For 
ppc, it does relate to a specific I/O page table.

Then I feel only a part of the protocol will be moved to /dev/ioasid and
something will still remain between kvm and vfio?

> 
> > But ARM's VMID usage is related to I/O address space thus needs some
> > consideration. Another strange thing is about PPC. Looks it also leverages
> > this protocol to do iommu group attach: kvm_spapr_tce_attach_iommu_
> > group. I don't know why it's done through KVM instead of VFIO uAPI in
> > the first place.
> 
> AIUI, IOMMU programming on PPC is done through hypercalls, so KVM
> needs
> to know how to handle those for in-kernel acceleration.  Thanks,
> 

ok.

Thanks
Kevin