Re: [PATCH v7 00/16] vfio: expose virtual Shared Virtual Addressing to VMs

["Jacob Pan (Jun)" <jacob.jun.pan@intel.com>]

Hi Jason,
On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 20:51:26 -0300, Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 03:08:51PM -0700, Jacob Pan wrote:
> > > A PASID vIOMMU solution sharable with VDPA and VFIO, based on a
> > > PASID control char dev (eg /dev/sva, or maybe /dev/iommu) seems
> > > like a reasonable starting point for discussion.  
> > 
> > I am not sure what can really be consolidated in /dev/sva.   
> 
> More or less, everything in this patch. All the manipulations of PASID
> that are required for vIOMMU use case/etc. Basically all PASID control
> that is not just a 1:1 mapping of the mm_struct.
> 
> > will have their own kerne-user interfaces anyway for their usage
> > models. They are just providing the specific transport while
> > sharing generic IOMMU UAPIs and IOASID management.  
> 
> > As I mentioned PASID management is already consolidated in the
> > IOASID layer, so for VDPA or other users, it just matter of create
> > its own ioasid_set, doing allocation.  
> 
> Creating the PASID is not the problem, managing what the PASID maps to
> is the issue. That is all uAPI that we don't really have today.
> 
> > IOASID is also available to the in-kernel users which does not
> > need /dev/sva AFAICT. For bare metal SVA, I don't see a need to
> > create this 'floating' state of the PASID when created by /dev/sva.
> > PASID allocation could happen behind the scene when users need to
> > bind page tables to a device DMA stream.  
> 
> My point is I would like to see one set of uAPI ioctls to bind page
> tables. I don't want to have VFIO, VDPA, etc, etc uAPIs to do the
> exact same things only slightly differently.
> 
Got your point. I am not familiar with VDPA but for VFIO UAPI, it is
very thin, mostly passthrough IOMMU UAPI struct as opaque data.

> If user space wants to bind page tables, create the PASID with
> /dev/sva, use ioctls there to setup the page table the way it wants,
> then pass the now configured PASID to a driver that can use it. 
> 
Are we talking about bare metal SVA? If so, I don't see the need for
userspace to know there is a PASID. All user space need is that my
current mm is bound to a device by the driver. So it can be a one-step
process for user instead of two.

> Driver does not do page table binding. Do not duplicate all the
> control plane uAPI in every driver.
> 
> PASID managment and binding is seperated from the driver(s) that are
> using the PASID.
> 
Why separate? Drivers need to be involved in PASID life cycle
management. For example, when tearing down a PASID, the driver needs to
stop DMA, IOMMU driver needs to unbind, etc. If driver is the control
point, then things are just in order. I am referring to bare metal SVA.

For guest SVA, I agree that binding is separate from PASID allocation.
Could you review this doc. in terms of life cycle?
https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/8/22/13

My point is that /dev/sda has no value for bare metal SVA, we are just
talking about if guest SVA UAPIs can be consolidated. Or am I missing
something?

> Jason


Thanks,

Jacob
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