Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH qemu v8 00/14] spapr: vfio: Enable Dynamic DMA windows (DDW)

[David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>]

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On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 09:37:22PM +1000, Alexey Kardashevskiy wrote:
> 
> (cut-n-paste from kernel patchset)
> 
> Each Partitionable Endpoint (IOMMU group) has an address range on a PCI bus
> where devices are allowed to do DMA. These ranges are called DMA windows.
> By default, there is a single DMA window, 1 or 2GB big, mapped at zero
> on a PCI bus.
> 
> PAPR defines a DDW RTAS API which allows pseries guests
> querying the hypervisor about DDW support and capabilities (page size mask
> for now). A pseries guest may request an additional (to the default)
> DMA windows using this RTAS API.
> The existing pseries Linux guests request an additional window as big as
> the guest RAM and map the entire guest window which effectively creates
> direct mapping of the guest memory to a PCI bus.
> 
> This patchset reworks PPC64 IOMMU code and adds necessary structures
> to support big windows.
> 
> Once a Linux guest discovers the presence of DDW, it does:
> 1. query hypervisor about number of available windows and page size masks;
> 2. create a window with the biggest possible page size (today 4K/64K/16M);
> 3. map the entire guest RAM via H_PUT_TCE* hypercalls;
> 4. switche dma_ops to direct_dma_ops on the selected PE.
> 
> Once this is done, H_PUT_TCE is not called anymore for 64bit devices and
> the guest does not waste time on DMA map/unmap operations.
> 
> Note that 32bit devices won't use DDW and will keep using the default
> DMA window so KVM optimizations will be required (to be posted later).
> 
> This patchset adds DDW support for pseries. The host kernel changes are
> required, posted as:
> 
> [PATCH kernel v11 00/34] powerpc/iommu/vfio: Enable Dynamic DMA windows
> 
> This patchset is based on git://github.com/dgibson/qemu.git spapr-next branch.

A couple of general queries - this touchs on the kernel part as well
as the qemu part:

 * Am I correct in thinking that the point in doing the
   pre-registration stuff is to allow the kernel to handle PUT_TCE
   in real mode?  i.e. that the advatage of doing preregistration
   rather than accounting on the DMA_MAP and DMA_UNMAP itself only
   appears once you have kernel KVM+VFIO acceleration?

 * Do you have test numbers to show that it's still worthwhile to have
   kernel acceleration once you have a guest using DDW?  With DDW in
   play, even if PUT_TCE is slow, it should be called a lot less
   often.

The reason I ask is that the preregistration handling is a pretty big
chunk of code that inserts itself into some pretty core kernel data
structures, all for one pretty specific use case.  We only want to do
that if there's a strong justification for it.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson

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