Thread (119 messages) 119 messages, 8 authors, 2018-09-10

Re: [RFC 0/4] Virtio uses DMA API for all devices

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Date: 2018-08-02 16:24:53
Also in: lkml, virtualization

On Thu, 2018-08-02 at 18:41 +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
quoted
I don't completely agree:

1 - VIRTIO_F_IOMMU_PLATFORM is a property of the "other side", ie qemu
for example. It indicates that the peer bypasses the normal platform
iommu. The platform code in the guest has no real way to know that this
is the case, this is a specific "feature" of the qemu implementation.

2 - VIRTIO_F_PLATFORM_DMA (or whatever you want to call it), is a
property of the guest platform itself (not qemu), there's no way the
"peer" can advertize it via the virtio negociated flags. At least for
us. I don't know for sure whether that would be workable for the ARM
case. In our case, qemu has no idea at VM creation time that the VM
will turn itself into a secure VM and thus will require bounce
buffering for IOs (including virtio).

So unless we have another hook for the arch code to set
VIRTIO_F_PLATFORM_DMA on selected (or all) virtio devices from the
guest itself, I don't see that as a way to deal with it.
quoted
 The other issue is VIRTIO_F_IO_BARRIER
which is very vaguely defined, and which needs a better definition.
And last but not least we'll need some text explaining the challenges
of hardware devices - I think VIRTIO_F_PLATFORM_DMA + VIRTIO_F_IO_BARRIER
is what would basically cover them, but a good description including
an explanation of why these matter.
Ben.
So is it true that from qemu point of view there is nothing special
going on?  You pass in a PA, host writes there.
Yes, qemu doesn't see a different. It's the guest that will bounce the
pages via a pool of "insecure" pages that qemu can access. Normal pages
in a secure VM come from PAs that qemu cannot physically access.

Cheers,
Ben.
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