[PATCH 0/4] vfio: Fix cdev second-open and harden selftests

From: Alex Williamson

Date: Tue Sep 01 2026 - 17:57:23 EST


In porting some testing infrastructure to a different system I found
the igb selftest failing in mix_and_match and generating a cascade
failure through the remaining tests. The difference in the new system
is the firmware error handling. When the igb device gets wedged due
to bad DMA in mix_and_match, we need to FLR the device. The igb holds
transaction pending asserted for the full duration of
pci_wait_for_pending(). Meanwhile, firmware based error handling is
triggering SMIs and stealing time, such that the 700ms total delay
in pci_wait_for_pending() turns into several seconds. With 10 cases
in mix_and_match generating bad DMAs, the transaction pending delays
alone push us close to the 30s per-test timeout. The worst case I
observed for the total test was ~45s. Increasing the mix_and_match
timeout to 90s provides plenty of headroom to get a passing test and
avoid the cascade failure.

When the process is killed via timeout, the release occurs through a
scheduled fput(), which is also delayed by the SMI storm. Each
subsequent test then sees a non-zero open_count (for the group open
in legacy mode or on the iommufd bind in the cdev mode), resulting in
the cascade failure. Group mode already uses -EBUSY when the group
fd open count is elevated, which allows selftests to interpret the
failure as potentially transient and implement a bounded retry. The
cdev path instead returns -EINVAL for this case. -EBUSY seems
justified here and allows userspace to have compatible retry flows
for group open and cdev bind operations.

A local sashiko review then found two existing issues. First, in
analyzing the exit flow from the iommufd bind, we can see that the
vf_token and kvm pointers are clobbered by the second process before
the open count test. The open_count test in vfio_df_open() is only
for the cdev path (!df->group) and is called under the dev_set lock,
so we really only need to relocate the test to
vfio_df_ioctl_bind_iommufd() prior to vf_token/kvm manipulation.

The second existing issue is that when executed via the kselftest
runner, all tests have a 45s timeout, which is the cumulative time
across each sub-test of the execution. The pci_driver test already
fails this with ioatdma, nv_falcon, and obviously with physical igb.
Running in parallel across both ports of an igb on the system prone
to SMI overhead, the worst case I saw was 450s. Therefore, we not
only need to extend the mix_and_match timeout to 90s to handle the
extra transaction pending delay, we need to extend the default
timeout to allow the full pci-driver test to complete when executed
via the runner. 600s is picked here as a "sufficient" margin.

Please review and comment. Thanks,

Alex

Alex Williamson (4):
vfio: Reject a second cdev open before mutating shared device state
selftests/vfio: Wait out transient -EBUSY on open/bind
selftests/vfio: Extend mix_and_match timeout to 90s
selftests/vfio: Extend timeout for runner executions

drivers/vfio/device_cdev.c | 12 ++++++++
drivers/vfio/vfio_main.c | 7 -----
tools/testing/selftests/vfio/.gitignore | 1 +
.../selftests/vfio/lib/vfio_pci_device.c | 29 +++++++++++++++++--
tools/testing/selftests/vfio/settings | 5 ++++
.../selftests/vfio/vfio_pci_driver_test.c | 2 +-
6 files changed, 46 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/vfio/settings


base-commit: cee9395acd8043be0644b25c34bfa86623f2b935
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2.53.0