Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] VFIO no-iommu

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2015 at 12:40:56PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> 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 think it's already useful like this, since all current users
seem happy enough to just use hugetlbfs to do pinning, and
ignore translation.

> 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.

In theory, it's kind of possible using paravirtualization.

Within guest, you'd make map_page retrieve the io address from the host
and return that as dma_addr_t.  The only question would be APIs that
require more than one contigious page in IO space (e.g. I think alloc
coherent is like this?).
Not a problem if host is using hugetlbfs, but if not, I guess we could
add a hypercall and some Linux API on the host to trigger compaction
on the host aggressively. MADV_CONTIGIOUS?


> 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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