Re: [PATCH 0/2] virtio: decouple protected guest RAM form VIRTIO_F_IOMMU_PLATFORM
From: Halil Pasic <pasic@linux.ibm.com>
Date: 2020-02-21 13:49:49
Also in:
linux-iommu, linux-s390, lkml
On Thu, 20 Feb 2020 16:33:35 -0500 "Michael S. Tsirkin" [off-list ref] wrote:
On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 05:06:04PM +0100, Halil Pasic wrote:quoted
For vhost-net the feature VIRTIO_F_IOMMU_PLATFORM has the following side effect The vhost code assumes it the addresses on the virtio descriptor ring are not guest physical addresses but iova's, and insists on doing a translation of these regardless of what transport is used (e.g. whether we emulate a PCI or a CCW device). (For details see commit 6b1e6cc7855b "vhost: new device IOTLB API".) On s390 this results in severe performance degradation (c.a. factor 10). BTW with ccw I/O there is (architecturally) no IOMMU, so the whole address translation makes no sense in the context of virtio-ccw.So it sounds like a host issue: the emulation of s390 unnecessarily complicated. Working around it by the guest looks wrong ...
While do think that forcing IOMMU_PLATFORM on devices that do not want or need it, just to trigger DMA API usage in guest is conceptually wrong, I do agree, that we might have a host issue. Namely, unlike PCI, CCW does not have an IOMMU, and the spec clearly states that "Whether accesses are actually limited or translated is described by platform-specific means.". With CCW devices we don't have address translation by IOMMU, and in that sense vhost is probably wrong about trying to do the translation. That is why I mentioned the patch, and that it's done regardless of the transport/platform. Regards, Halil
quoted
Halil Pasic (2): mm: move force_dma_unencrypted() to mem_encrypt.h virtio: let virtio use DMA API when guest RAM is protected drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c | 3 +++ include/linux/dma-direct.h | 9 --------- include/linux/mem_encrypt.h | 10 ++++++++++ 3 files changed, 13 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) base-commit: ca7e1fd1026c5af6a533b4b5447e1d2f153e28f2 -- 2.17.1