Re: [PATCH v1 14/14] iommu/arm-smmu-v3: Add arm_smmu_cache_invalidate_user

[Nicolin Chen]

On Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 11:31:04AM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 02:49:14PM +0000, Robin Murphy wrote:
> 
> > If the design here is that user_data is so deeply driver-specific and
> > special to the point that it can't possibly be passed as a type-checked
> > union of the known and publicly-visible UAPI types that it is, wouldn't it
> > make sense to just encode the whole thing in the expected format and not
> > have to make these kinds of niggling little conversions at both ends?
> 
> Yes, I suspect the design for ARM should have the input be the entire
> actual command work queue entry. There is no reason to burn CPU cycles
> in userspace marshalling it to something else and then decode it again
> in the kernel. Organize things to point the ioctl directly at the
> queue entry, and the kernel can do a single memcpy from guest
> controlled pages to kernel memory then parse it?

There still can be complications to do something straightforward
like that. Firstly, the consumer and producer indexes might need
to be synced between the host and kernel? Secondly, things like
SID and VMID fields in the commands need to be replaced manually
when the host kernel reads commands out, which means that there
need to be a translation table(s) in the host kernel to replace
those fields. These actually are parts of the features of VCMDQ
hardware itself.

Though I am not sure about the amounts of burning CPU cycles, it
at least can simplify the uAPI a bit and meanwhile address the
multiplying issue at the ATC_INV command that Robin raised, so
long as we ensure the consumer and producer indexes wouldn't be
messed between host and guest?

Thanks
Nic