Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/4] vfio: Add IOPF support for VFIO passthrough

[Lu Baolu]

On 3/18/21 7:53 PM, Shenming Lu wrote:
> On 2021/3/18 17:07, Tian, Kevin wrote:
> > > From: Shenming Lu <lushenming@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2021 3:53 PM
> > >
> > > On 2021/2/4 14:52, Tian, Kevin wrote:>>> In reality, many
> > > > > > devices allow I/O faulting only in selective contexts. However, there
> > > > > > is no standard way (e.g. PCISIG) for the device to report whether
> > > > > > arbitrary I/O fault is allowed. Then we may have to maintain device
> > > > > > specific knowledge in software, e.g. in an opt-in table to list devices
> > > > > > which allows arbitrary faults. For devices which only support selective
> > > > > > faulting, a mediator (either through vendor extensions on vfio-pci-core
> > > > > > or a mdev wrapper) might be necessary to help lock down non-faultable
> > > > > > mappings and then enable faulting on the rest mappings.
> > > > >
> > > > > For devices which only support selective faulting, they could tell it to the
> > > > > IOMMU driver and let it filter out non-faultable faults? Do I get it wrong?
> > > >
> > > > Not exactly to IOMMU driver. There is already a vfio_pin_pages() for
> > > > selectively page-pinning. The matter is that 'they' imply some device
> > > > specific logic to decide which pages must be pinned and such knowledge
> > > > is outside of VFIO.
> > > >
> > > >  From enabling p.o.v we could possibly do it in phased approach. First
> > > > handles devices which tolerate arbitrary DMA faults, and then extends
> > > > to devices with selective-faulting. The former is simpler, but with one
> > > > main open whether we want to maintain such device IDs in a static
> > > > table in VFIO or rely on some hints from other components (e.g. PF
> > > > driver in VF assignment case). Let's see how Alex thinks about it.
> > >
> > > Hi Kevin,
> > >
> > > You mentioned selective-faulting some time ago. I still have some doubt
> > > about it:
> > > There is already a vfio_pin_pages() which is used for limiting the IOMMU
> > > group dirty scope to pinned pages, could it also be used for indicating
> > > the faultable scope is limited to the pinned pages and the rest mappings
> > > is non-faultable that should be pinned and mapped immediately? But it
> > > seems to be a little weird and not exactly to what you meant... I will
> > > be grateful if you can help to explain further. :-)
> >
> > The opposite, i.e. the vendor driver uses vfio_pin_pages to lock down
> > pages that are not faultable (based on its specific knowledge) and then
> > the rest memory becomes faultable.
>
> Ahh...
> Thus, from the perspective of VFIO IOMMU, if IOPF enabled for such device,
> only the page faults within the pinned range are valid in the registered
> iommu fault handler...

Isn't it opposite? The pinned pages will never generate any page faults.
I might miss some contexts here.

> I have another question here, for the IOMMU backed devices, they are already
> all pinned and mapped when attaching, is there a need to call vfio_pin_pages()
> to lock down pages for them? Did I miss something?...

Best regards,
baolu