Re: [PATCH RFC] fixup! virtio: convert to use DMA api

From: Andy Lutomirski
Date: Mon Apr 18 2016 - 15:24:41 EST


On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 11:29 AM, David Woodhouse <dwmw2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> For x86, you *can* enable virtio-behind-IOMMU if your DMAR tables tell
> the truth, and even legacy kernels ought to cope with that.
> FSVO 'ought to' where I suspect some of them will actually crash with a
> NULL pointer dereference if there's no "catch-all" DMAR unit in the
> tables, which puts it back into the same camp as ARM and Power.

I think x86 may get a bit of a free pass here. AFAIK the QEMU IOMMU
implementation on x86 has always been "experimental", so it just might
be okay to change it in a way that causes some older kernels to OOPS.

--Andy