Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] iommu/vt-d: Remove caching mode check before device TLB flush

From: Yi Liu
Date: Mon Apr 15 2024 - 02:53:03 EST


On 2024/4/15 13:00, Baolu Lu wrote:
On 4/15/24 10:43 AM, Yi Liu wrote:
On 2024/4/15 10:22, Zhang, Tina wrote:


-----Original Message-----
From: Lu Baolu <baolu.lu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2024 9:39 AM
To: iommu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Tian, Kevin <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx>; Liu, Yi L <yi.l.liu@xxxxxxxxx>; Jacob
Pan <jacob.jun.pan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; Joerg Roedel <joro@xxxxxxxxxx>; Will
Deacon <will@xxxxxxxxxx>; Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@xxxxxxx>; linux-
kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; Lu Baolu <baolu.lu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [PATCH v3 1/1] iommu/vt-d: Remove caching mode check before
device TLB flush

The Caching Mode (CM) of the Intel IOMMU indicates if the hardware
implementation caches not-present or erroneous translation-structure entries
except for the first-stage translation. The caching mode is irrelevant to the
device TLB, therefore there is no need to check it before a device TLB
invalidation operation.

Remove two caching mode checks before device TLB invalidation in the driver.
The removal of these checks doesn't change the driver's behavior in critical
map/unmap paths. Hence, there is no functionality or performance impact,
especially since commit <29b32839725f> ("iommu/vt-d:
Do not use flush-queue when caching-mode is on") has already disabled
flush-queue for caching mode. Therefore, caching mode will never call
intel_flush_iotlb_all().
The current logic is if the caching mode is being used and a domain isn't using first level I/O page table, then flush-queue won't be used. Otherwise, the flush-queue can be enabled.
See https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/257ec29074

In other words, if the caching mode is being used and a domain is using first level I/O page table, the flush-queue can be used for this domain to flush iotlb. Could the code change in this patch bring any performance impact to this case?

This seems to have performance deduction in the nested translation case.
The iommufd nested support bas been merged in 6.8, while the Qemu side
is wip. So this performance deduction does not happen until Qemu is
done. Should this also be considered as a performance regression? TBH.

Caching mode is irrelevant to first-stage and nesting translations. If
the QEMU implementation still relies on caching mode for nesting
support, it's already broken.

For first-stage, yes, caching mode is irrelevant. But for nesting, still
be relevant. Because it relies on caching mode to capture the mofifications
of the pasid entry. Without caching mode, vIOMMU device model within QEMU will miss the newly setup pasid entries, hence no way to setup nested
translation at all.

--
Regards,
Yi Liu