Re: [PATCH v2 1/1] KVM: arm64: allow the VM to select DEVICE_* and NORMAL_NC for IO memory

[Catalin Marinas]

On Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 11:38:09AM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 04:18:05PM +0100, Lorenzo Pieralisi wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 11:05:56AM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > On Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 02:49:02PM +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > > BTW, on those Mellanox devices that require different attributes within
> > > > a BAR, do they have a problem with speculative reads causing
> > > > side-effects? 
> > > 
> > > Yes. We definitely have had that problem in the past on older
> > > devices. VFIO must map the BAR using pgprot_device/noncached() into
> > > the VMM, no other choice is functionally OK.
> > 
> > Were those BARs tagged as prefetchable or non-prefetchable ? I assume the
> > latter but please let me know if I am guessing wrong.
> 
> I don't know it was quite old HW. Probably.
> 
> Just because a BAR is not marked as prefetchable doesn't mean that the
> device can't use NORMAL_NC on subsets of it.

What about the other way around - would we have a prefetchable BAR that
has portions which are unprefetchable?

-- 
Catalin