Re: [RFC 1/2] vfio/pci: keep the prefetchable attribute of a BAR region in VMA
From: Marc Zyngier <maz@kernel.org>
Date: 2021-05-03 09:52:49
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kvmarm
On Sat, 01 May 2021 12:36:11 +0100, Shanker R Donthineni [off-list ref] wrote:
Hi Marc, On 5/1/21 4:30 AM, Marc Zyngier wrote:quoted
quoted
I think Device GRE has some practical problems. 1. A lot of userspace code which is used to getting write combined mappings to GPU memory from kernel drivers does memcpy/memset on it which can insert ldp/stp which can crash on Device Memory Type. From a quick search I didn't find a memcpy_io or memset_io in glibc. Perhaps there are some other functions available, but a lot of userspace applications that work on x86 and ARM baremetal won't work on ARM VMs without such changes. Changes to all of userspace may not always be practical, specially if linking to binariesThis seems to go against what Alex was hinting at earlier, which is that unaligned accesses were not expected on prefetchable regions, and Shanker latter confirming that it was an actual bug. Where do we stand here?We agreed to call it a driver bug if it's not following Linux write-combining API ioremap_wc() semantics. So far I didn't find whether unaligned accesses allowed or not for WC regions explicitly in Linux documentation.
And that's exactly the kind of problem I want clarification on before we add *anything* to KVM. Proper, unambiguous definition of what WC is on the CPU side, and how it maps onto PCI. Without such a definition, we're just driving blind.
Page faults due to driver unaligned accesses in kernel space will be under driver control, we'll fix it. Driver uses the architecture agnostic functions that are available in the Linux kernel and expecting the same behavior in VM vs Baremetal. We would like to keep the driver implementation is architecture-independent as much as possible and support VM unaware. For ARM64, VM's ioremap_wc() definition doesn't match baremetal.
You are mixing two things: what Linux/arm64 gives to kernel drivers, and what KVM, as an implementation of the ARMv8 architecture, gives to virtual machines. There is zero reason for the two to match if there is no definition of what we need to provide.
We don't have any control over the userspace applications/drivers/libraries as Vikram saying. Another example GCC memset() function uses 'DC ZVA' which triggers an alignment fault if the actual memory type is device_xxx.
Again, you're talking about an application, and I'm talking about how to map a nebulous concept that originated on a foreign architecture onto something that is entirely different. So please drop the "that's how my SW works", and instead give me a good definition of what WC means in architectural terms. Thanks M. -- Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. _______________________________________________ linux-arm-kernel mailing list linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-arm-kernel