Re: Xen virtual IOMMU high level design doc V2

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

> From: Andrew Cooper [mailto:andrew.cooper3@citrix.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2016 3:18 AM
> 
> >
> > 1.2 Support VFIO-based user space driver (e.g. DPDK) in the guest
> > It relies on the l2 translation capability (IOVA->GPA) on
> > vIOMMU. pIOMMU l2 becomes a shadowing structure of
> > vIOMMU to isolate DMA requests initiated by user space driver.
> 
> How is userspace supposed to drive this interface?  I can't picture how
> it would function.

Inside a Linux VM, VFIO provides DMA MAP/UNMAP interface to user space
driver so gIOVA->GPA mapping can be setup on vIOMMU. vIOMMU will 
export a "caching mode" capability to indicate all guest PTE changes 
requiring explicit vIOMMU cache invalidations. Through trapping of those
invalidation requests, Xen can update corresponding shadow PTEs (gIOVA
->HPA). When DMA mapping is established, user space driver programs 
gIOVA addresses as DMA destination to assigned device, and then upstreaming
DMA request out of this device contains gIOVA which is translated to HPA
by pIOMMU shadow page table.

> 
> >
> >
> > 1.3 Support guest SVM (Shared Virtual Memory)
> > It relies on the l1 translation table capability (GVA->GPA) on
> > vIOMMU. pIOMMU needs to enable both l1 and l2 translation in nested
> > mode (GVA->GPA->HPA) for passthrough device. IGD passthrough
> > is the main usage today (to support OpenCL 2.0 SVM feature). In the
> > future SVM might be used by other I/O devices too.
> 
> As an aside, how is IGD intending to support SVM?  Will it be with PCIe
> ATS/PASID, or something rather more magic as IGD is on the same piece of
> silicon?

Although integrated, IGD conforms to standard PCIe PASID convention.

> > 3.5 Implementation consideration
> > VT-d spec doesn't define a capability bit for the l2 translation.
> > Architecturally there is no way to tell guest that l2 translation
> > capability is not available. Linux Intel IOMMU driver thinks l2
> > translation is always available when VTD exits and fail to be loaded
> > without l2 translation support even if interrupt remapping and l1
> > translation are available. So it needs to enable l2 translation first
> > before other functions.
> 
> What then is the purpose of the nested translation support bit in the
> extended capability register?
> 

Nested translation is for SVM virtualization. Given a DMA transaction 
containing a PASID, VT-d engine first finds the 1st translation table 
through PASID to translate from GVA to GPA, then once nested
translation capability is enabled, further translate GPA to HPA using the
2nd level translation table. Bare-metal usage is not expected to turn
on this nested bit.

Thanks
Kevin

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