Re: [RFC PATCH 1/5] x86/xen: disable swiotlb for xen pvh

[Jan Beulich]

On 15.03.2023 01:52, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Mar 2023, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 12.03.2023 13:01, Huang Rui wrote:
>>> Xen PVH is the paravirtualized mode and takes advantage of hardware
>>> virtualization support when possible. It will using the hardware IOMMU
>>> support instead of xen-swiotlb, so disable swiotlb if current domain is
>>> Xen PVH.
>>
>> But the kernel has no way (yet) to drive the IOMMU, so how can it get
>> away without resorting to swiotlb in certain cases (like I/O to an
>> address-restricted device)?
> 
> I think Ray meant that, thanks to the IOMMU setup by Xen, there is no
> need for swiotlb-xen in Dom0. Address translations are done by the IOMMU
> so we can use guest physical addresses instead of machine addresses for
> DMA. This is a similar case to Dom0 on ARM when the IOMMU is available
> (see include/xen/arm/swiotlb-xen.h:xen_swiotlb_detect, the corresponding
> case is XENFEAT_not_direct_mapped).

But how does Xen using an IOMMU help with, as said, address-restricted
devices? They may still need e.g. a 32-bit address to be programmed in,
and if the kernel has memory beyond the 4G boundary not all I/O buffers
may fulfill this requirement.

Jan