Re: [XEN-IOMMU] Proposal of DMA protection/isolation support

["Wei Wang2" <wei.wang2@amd.com>]

On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 16:45 +0000, Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 16/1/08 16:34, "Wei Wang2" <wei.wang2@amd.com> wrote:
> 
> > 1) Before submitting io request to generic block layer, block backend
> > driver will invoke GNTTABOPs to map granted remote pages .  However
> > creating iommu mapping only in GNTTABOP not very enough because local
> > pages will also be submitted to block layer and they should also be
> > translated by iommu.
> 
> Local pages could always be mapped into the iommu, and only remote pages
> would need to be temporarily mapped via the gnttab hooks.
I remembered that vtd patch used to hook page assignment to for this,
but it was soon replaced with statical 1:1 mapping. Could you suggest me
how to trace local page changes instead of mapping whole the physical
ram?

> 2) When dma layer is invoked to prepare a bus address for native block
> > device driver. It would be better to have a "hypervisor-aware" dma layer
> > which always maps virtual address to bus address via hypercall.
> > __gnttab_dma_map_page() might be a good place to trigger this new
> > hypercall. Both remote and local pages can be mapped by this way.
> 
> An extra hypercall here will likely hurt performance.
I have implemented a prototype for this which removes 1:1 mapping and invoke a hypercall for 
dma mapping. Since block driver uses dma_map_sg heavily which is easy to batch, I have not seen dramatic performance loss.

-Wei

 

>  -- Keir
> 
> 
> 
> 

-Wei