Re: [PATCH RFC 00/15] Add VFIO mediated device support and IMS support for the idxd driver.

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@mellanox.com>]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 12:53:25AM +0000, Tian, Kevin wrote:
> > From: Jason Gunthorpe
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 7:55 AM
> > 
> > On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 04:33:46PM -0700, Dave Jiang wrote:
> > > The actual code is independent of the stage 2 driver code submission that
> > adds
> > > support for SVM, ENQCMD(S), PASID, and shared workqueues. This code
> > series will
> > > support dedicated workqueue on a guest with no vIOMMU.
> > >
> > > A new device type "mdev" is introduced for the idxd driver. This allows the
> > wq
> > > to be dedicated to the usage of a VFIO mediated device (mdev). Once the
> > work
> > > queue (wq) is enabled, an uuid generated by the user can be added to the
> > wq
> > > through the uuid sysfs attribute for the wq.  After the association, a mdev
> > can
> > > be created using this UUID. The mdev driver code will associate the uuid
> > and
> > > setup the mdev on the driver side. When the create operation is successful,
> > the
> > > uuid can be passed to qemu. When the guest boots up, it should discover a
> > DSA
> > > device when doing PCI discovery.
> > 
> > I'm feeling really skeptical that adding all this PCI config space and
> > MMIO BAR emulation to the kernel just to cram this into a VFIO
> > interface is a good idea, that kind of stuff is much safer in
> > userspace.
> > 
> > Particularly since vfio is not really needed once a driver is using
> > the PASID stuff. We already have general code for drivers to use to
> > attach a PASID to a mm_struct - and using vfio while disabling all the
> > DMA/iommu config really seems like an abuse.
> 
> Well, this series is for virtualizing idxd device to VMs, instead of
> supporting SVA for bare metal processes. idxd implements a
> hardware-assisted mediated device technique called Intel Scalable
> I/O Virtualization,

I'm familiar with the intel naming scheme.

> which allows each Assignable Device Interface (ADI, e.g. a work
> queue) tagged with an unique PASID to ensure fine-grained DMA
> isolation when those ADIs are assigned to different VMs. For this
> purpose idxd utilizes the VFIO mdev framework and IOMMU aux-domain
> extension. Bare metal SVA will be enabled for idxd later by using
> the general SVA code that you mentioned.  Both paths will co-exist
> in the end so there is no such case of disabling DMA/iommu config.
 
Again, if you will have a normal SVA interface, there is no need for a
VFIO version, just use normal SVA for both.

PCI emulation should try to be in userspace, not the kernel, for
security.

Jason