From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
To: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, gang.wei@intel.com,
jroedel@suse.de, hpa@linux.intel.com, kernel-team@fb.com,
ning.sun@intel.com, srihan@fb.com, alex.eydelberg@intel.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH V2] x86/tboot: add an option to disable iommu force on
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2017 08:51:42 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170427065142.lnsdegq7zwxacqo2@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1c2cadcf5cd7d19cea93c56435610e61b551bd1e.1493223474.git.shli@fb.com>
* Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com> wrote:
> IOMMU harms performance signficantly when we run very fast networking
> workloads. It's 40GB networking doing XDP test. Software overhead is
> almost unaware, but it's the IOTLB miss (based on our analysis) which
> kills the performance. We observed the same performance issue even with
> software passthrough (identity mapping), only the hardware passthrough
> survives. The pps with iommu (with software passthrough) is only about
> ~30% of that without it. This is a limitation in hardware based on our
> observation, so we'd like to disable the IOMMU force on, but we do want
> to use TBOOT and we can sacrifice the DMA security bought by IOMMU. I
> must admit I know nothing about TBOOT, but TBOOT guys (cc-ed) think not
> eabling IOMMU is totally ok.
>
> So introduce a new boot option to disable the force on. It's kind of
> silly we need to run into intel_iommu_init even without force on, but we
> need to disable TBOOT PMR registers. For system without the boot option,
> nothing is changed.
>
> Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
> ---
> Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt | 9 +++++++++
> arch/x86/kernel/tboot.c | 3 +++
> drivers/iommu/intel-iommu.c | 18 ++++++++++++++++++
> include/linux/dma_remapping.h | 1 +
> 4 files changed, 31 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
> index 33a3b54..8a3fb0d 100644
> --- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
> @@ -1579,6 +1579,15 @@
> extended tables themselves, and also PASID support. With
> this option set, extended tables will not be used even
> on hardware which claims to support them.
> + tboot_noforce [Default Off]
> + Do not force the Intel IOMMU enabled under tboot.
> + By default, tboot will force Intel IOMMU on, which
> + could harm performance of some high-throughput
> + devices like 40GBit network cards, even if identity
> + mapping is enabled.
> + Note that using this option lowers the security
> + provided by tboot because it makes the system
> + vulnerable to DMA attacks.
So what's the purpose of this kernel option?
It sure isn't the proper solution for correctly architectured hardware/firmware
(which can just choose not to expose the IOMMU!), and for one-time hacks for
special embedded systems or for debugging why not just add an iommu=off option to
force it off?
This just increases complexity for no good reason.
Thanks,
Ingo
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-04-27 6:51 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-04-26 16:18 [PATCH V2] x86/tboot: add an option to disable iommu force on Shaohua Li
2017-04-26 21:59 ` Joerg Roedel
2017-04-27 6:52 ` Ingo Molnar
2017-04-28 22:07 ` Joerg Roedel
2017-04-27 6:51 ` Ingo Molnar [this message]
2017-04-27 8:42 ` Joerg Roedel
2017-04-27 14:49 ` Shaohua Li
2017-04-27 15:18 ` Joerg Roedel
2017-04-27 15:41 ` Shaohua Li
2017-04-27 16:04 ` Joerg Roedel
2017-05-05 6:59 ` Ingo Molnar
2017-05-05 8:40 ` Joerg Roedel
2017-05-06 9:48 ` Ingo Molnar
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