qemu-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH] vfio: VFIO Driver core framework


From: Stuart Yoder
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH] vfio: VFIO Driver core framework
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:41:49 -0600

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Alex Williamson
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 17:20 -0600, Stuart Yoder wrote:
>> >
>> > BTW, github now has updated trees:
>> >
>> > git://github.com/awilliam/linux-vfio.git vfio-next-20111129
>> > git://github.com/awilliam/qemu-vfio.git vfio-ng
>>
>> Hi Alex,
>>
>> Have been looking at vfio a bit.   A few observations and things
>> we'll need to figure out as it relates to the Freescale iommu.
>>
>> __vfio_dma_map() assumes that mappings are broken into
>> 4KB pages.   That will not be true for us.   We normally will be mapping
>> much larger physically contiguous chunks for our guests.  Guests will
>> get hugetlbfs backed memory with very large pages (e.g. 16MB,
>> 64MB) or very large chunks allocated by some proprietary
>> means.
>
> Hi Stuart,
>
> I think practically everyone has commented on the 4k mappings ;)  There
> are a few problems around this.  The first is that iommu drivers don't
> necessarily support sub-region unmapping, so if we map 1GB and later
> want to unmap 4k, we can't do it atomically.  4k gives us the most
> flexibility for supporting fine granularities.  Another problem is that
> we're using get_user_pages to pin memory.  It's been suggested that we
> should use mlock for this, but I can't find anything that prevents a
> user from later munlock'ing the memory and then getting access to memory
> they shouldn't have.  Those kind of limit us, but I don't see it being
> an API problem for VFIO, just implementation.

Ok.

>> Also, mappings will have additional Freescale-specific attributes
>> that need to get passed through to dma_map somehow.   For
>> example, the iommu can stash directly into a CPU's cache
>> and we have iommu mapping properties like the cache stash
>> target id and an operation mapping attribute.
>>
>> How do you envision handling proprietary attributes
>> in struct vfio_dma_map?
>
> Let me turn the question around, how do you plan to support proprietary
> attributes in the IOMMU API?  Is the user level the appropriate place to
> specify them, or are they an intrinsic feature of the domain?  We've
> designed struct vfio_dma_map for extension, so depending on how many
> bits you need, we can make a conduit using the flags directly or setting
> a new flag to indicate presence of an arch specific attributes field.

The attributes are not intrinsic features of the domain.  User space will
need to set them.  But in thinking about it a bit more I think the attributes
are more properties of the domain rather than a per map() operation
characteristic.  I think a separate API might be appropriate.  Define a
new set_domain_attrs() op in the iommu_ops.    In user space, perhaps
 a new vfio group API-- VFIO_GROUP_SET_ATTRS,
VFIO_GROUP_GET_ATTRS.

Stuart



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]