Re: [RFC PATCH 1/3] content: Add VIRTIO_F_SWIOTLB to negotiate use of SWIOTLB bounce buffers

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2025 at 12:15:52PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > What I don't get, is what does the *device* want, exactly?
> 
> The device wants to know that a driver won't try to use it without
> understanding the restriction. Because otherwise the driver will just
> give it system addresses for DMA and be sad, without any coherent
> error/failure report about why.
> 
> (You could ask the same question about what the *device* wants with
> VIRTIO_F_ACCESS_PLATFORM, and the answer is much the same).
> 
> Or maybe not the *device* per se, but the *system integrator* wants to
> know that only operating systems which understand the restriction
> described above, will attempt to drive the device in question.
> 
> We could achieve that by presenting the device with a completely new
> PCI device/vendor ID so that old drivers don't match, or in the DT
> model you could make a new "compatible" string for it. I chose to use a
> VIRTIO_F_ bit for it instead, which seemed natural and allows the
> device model (under the influence of the system integrator) to *choose*
> whether a failure to negotiate such bit is fatal or not.

Let's focus on the mmio part, for simplicity.
So IIUC there's a devicetree attribute restricted dma, that
guests currently simply ignore.
You want to fix it in the guest, but you also want to find a clean way
to detect that it's fixed. Right?

And if so, my question is, why this specific bug especially?
There likely are a ton of bugs, some more catastrophic than just
crashing the guest, like data corruption.
Is it because we were supposed to add it to the virtio spec but
did not?

-- 
MST