Re: [RFC] /dev/ioasid uAPI proposal

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2021 14:35:10 -0300
Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 02, 2021 at 11:11:17AM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> 
> > > > > present and be able to test if DMA for that device is cache
> > > > > coherent.    
> > > 
> > > Why is this such a strong linkage to VFIO and not just a 'hey kvm
> > > emulate wbinvd' flag from qemu?  
> > 
> > IIRC, wbinvd has host implications, a malicious user could tell KVM to
> > emulate wbinvd then run the op in a loop and induce a disproportionate
> > load on the system.  We therefore wanted a way that it would only be
> > enabled when required.  
> 
> I think the non-coherentness is vfio_device specific? eg a specific
> device will decide if it is coherent or not?

No, this is specifically whether DMA is cache coherent to the
processor, ie. in the case of wbinvd whether the processor needs to
invalidate its cache in order to see data from DMA.

> If yes I'd recast this to call kvm_arch_register_noncoherent_dma()
> from the VFIO_GROUP_NOTIFY_SET_KVM in the struct vfio_device
> implementation and not link it through the IOMMU.

The IOMMU tells us if DMA is cache coherent, VFIO_DMA_CC_IOMMU maps to
IOMMU_CAP_CACHE_COHERENCY for all domains within a container.

> If userspace is telling the vfio_device to be non-coherent or not then
> it can call kvm_arch_register_noncoherent_dma() or not based on that
> signal.

Not non-coherent device memory, that would be a driver issue, cache
coherence of DMA is what we're after.

> > > It kind of looks like the other main point is to generate the
> > > VFIO_GROUP_NOTIFY_SET_KVM which is being used by two VFIO drivers to
> > > connect back to the kvm data
> > > 
> > > But that seems like it would have been better handled with some IOCTL
> > > on the vfio_device fd to import the KVM to the driver not this
> > > roundabout way?  
> > 
> > Then QEMU would need to know which drivers require KVM knowledge?  This
> > allowed transparent backwards compatibility with userspace.  Thanks,  
> 
> I'd just blindly fire a generic 'hey here is your KVM FD' into every
> VFIO device.

Yes, QEMU could do this, but the vfio-kvm device was already there with
this association and required no uAPI work.  This one is the least IOMMU
related of the use cases.  Thanks,

Alex