[RFC PATCH 0/2] VFIO no-iommu

[Alex Williamson]

Recent patches for UIO have been attempting to add MSI/X support,
which unfortunately implies DMA support, which users have been
enabling anyway, but was never intended for UIO.  VFIO on the other
hand expects an IOMMU to provide isolation of devices, but provides
a much more complete device interface, which already supports full
MSI/X support.  There's really no way to support userspace drivers
with DMA capable devices without an IOMMU to protect the host, but
we can at least think about doing it in a way that properly taints
the kernel and avoids creating new code duplicating existing code,
that does have a supportable use case.

The diffstat is only so large because I moved vfio.c to vfio_core.c
so I could more easily keep the module named vfio.ko while keeping
the bulk of the no-iommu support in a separate file that can be
optionally compiled.  We're really looking at a couple hundred lines
of mostly stub code.  The VFIO_NOIOMMU_IOMMU could certainly be
expanded to do page pinning and virt_to_bus() translation, but I
didn't want to complicate anything yet.

I've only compiled this and tested loading the module with the new
no-iommu mode enabled, I haven't actually tried to port a DPDK
driver to it, though it ought to be a pretty obvious mix of the
existing UIO and VFIO versions (set the IOMMU, but avoid using it
for mapping, use however bus translations are done w/ UIO).  The core
vfio device file is still /dev/vfio/vfio, but all the groups become
/dev/vfio-noiommu/$GROUP.

It should be obvious, but I always feel obligated to state that this
does not and will not ever enable device assignment to virtual
machines on non-IOMMU capable platforms.

I'm curious what IOMMU folks think of this.  This hack is really
only possible because we don't use iommu_ops for regular DMA, so we
can hijack it fairly safely.  I believe that's intended to change
though, so this may not be practical long term.  Thanks,

Alex

---

Alex Williamson (2):
      vfio: Move vfio.c vfio_core.c
      vfio: Include no-iommu mode


 drivers/vfio/Kconfig        |   15 
 drivers/vfio/Makefile       |    4 
 drivers/vfio/vfio.c         | 1640 ------------------------------------------
 drivers/vfio/vfio_core.c    | 1680 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 drivers/vfio/vfio_noiommu.c |  185 +++++
 drivers/vfio/vfio_private.h |   31 +
 include/uapi/linux/vfio.h   |    2 
 7 files changed, 1917 insertions(+), 1640 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 drivers/vfio/vfio.c
 create mode 100644 drivers/vfio/vfio_core.c
 create mode 100644 drivers/vfio/vfio_noiommu.c
 create mode 100644 drivers/vfio/vfio_private.h
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