Re: [PATCH v1 14/14] iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Add arm_smmu_cache_invalidate_user

[Nicolin Chen <nicolinc@nvidia.com>]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 11:57:09AM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 09:02:34AM +0000, Tian, Kevin wrote:
> > > From: Nicolin Chen <nicolinc@nvidia.com>
> > > Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2023 2:42 PM
> > > 
> > > On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 08:48:31AM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > > On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 08:34:00AM +0000, Tian, Kevin wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > > > Rephrasing that to put into a design: the IOCTL would pass a
> > > > > > > user pointer to the queue, the size of the queue, then a head
> > > > > > > pointer and a tail pointer? Then the kernel reads out all the
> > > > > > > commands between the head and the tail and handles all those
> > > > > > > invalidation commands only?
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Yes, that is one possible design
> > > > >
> > > > > If we cannot have the short path in the kernel then I'm not sure the
> > > > > value of using native format and queue in the uAPI. Batching can
> > > > > be enabled over any format.
> > > >
> > > > SMMUv3 will have a hardware short path where the HW itself runs the
> > > > VM's command queue and does this logic.
> > > >
> > > > So I like the symmetry of the SW path being close to that.
> > > 
> > > A tricky thing here that I just realized:
> > > 
> > > With VCMDQ, the guest will have two CMDQs. One is the vSMMU's
> > > CMDQ handling all non-TLBI commands like CMD_CFGI_STE via the
> > > invalidation IOCTL, and the other hardware accelerated VCMDQ
> > > handling all TLBI commands by the HW. In this setup, we will
> > > need a VCMDQ kernel driver to dispatch commands into the two
> > > different queues.
> > > 
> > 
> > why doesn't hw generate a vm-exit for unsupported CMDs in VCMDQ
> > and then let them emulated by vSMMU? such events should be rare
> > once map/unmap are being conducted...
> 
> IIRC vcmdq is defined to only process invalidations, so it would be a
> driver error to send anything else. I think this is what Nicolin
> means.  Most likely to use it the VM would have to see the nvidia acpi
> extension and activate vcmdq in the VM.
> 
> If you suggest to overlay the main cmdq with the vcmdq and then don't
> tell the guest about it.. Robin suggested something similar.

Yea, I remember that too, from the email that I received from
Robin on Christmas Eve :)

Yet, I haven't got a chance to run some experiment with that.

> This idea would be a half and half, the HW would run the queue and the
> doorbell and generate error interrupts back to the hypervisor and tell
> it that the queue is paused and ask it to fix the failed entry and
> restart.
>
> I could see this as an interesting solution, but I don't know if this
> HW can support it..

It possibly can, since an unsupported command will trigger an
Illegal Command interrupt, then the IRQ handler could read it
out of the CMDQ. Again, I'd need to run some experiment, once
this SMMU nesting series is settled down to certain level.

One immediate thing about this solution is that we still need
a multi-CMDQ support per SMMU instance, besides from a multi-
SMMU instance support. This might be implemented as the ECMDQ
I guess. But I am not sure if there is a ECMDQ HW available,
so that we can add its support first, to fit VCMDQ into it.

Overall, interesting topics! I'd like to carry on along the
way of this series, hoping we can figure out something smart
and solid to implement :)

Thanks
Nicolin