Re: [PATCH v2 1/1] KVM: arm64: allow the VM to select DEVICE_* and NORMAL_NC for IO memory

From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>
To: Lorenzo Pieralisi <lpieralisi@kernel.org>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>,
	Marc Zyngier <maz@kernel.org>,
	ankita@nvidia.com,
	Shameerali Kolothum Thodi <shameerali.kolothum.thodi@huawei.com>,
	oliver.upton@linux.dev, suzuki.poulose@arm.com,
	yuzenghui@huawei.com, will@kernel.org, ardb@kernel.org,
	akpm@linux-foundation.org, gshan@redhat.com, aniketa@nvidia.com,
	cjia@nvidia.com, kwankhede@nvidia.com, targupta@nvidia.com,
	vsethi@nvidia.com, acurrid@nvidia.com, apopple@nvidia.com,
	jhubbard@nvidia.com, danw@nvidia.com, mochs@nvidia.com,
	kvmarm@lists.linux.dev, kvm@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 1/1] KVM: arm64: allow the VM to select DEVICE_* and NORMAL_NC for IO memory
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2023 11:38:09 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20231206153809.GS2692119@nvidia.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <ZXCQrTbf6q0BIhSw@lpieralisi>

On Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 04:18:05PM +0100, Lorenzo Pieralisi wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 11:05:56AM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 06, 2023 at 02:49:02PM +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > On Tue, Dec 05, 2023 at 03:48:22PM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > > On Tue, Dec 05, 2023 at 07:24:37PM +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, Dec 05, 2023 at 12:43:18PM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > > > > What if we change vfio-pci to use pgprot_device() like it already
> > > > > > really should and say the pgprot_noncached() is enforced as
> > > > > > DEVICE_nGnRnE and pgprot_device() may be DEVICE_nGnRE or NORMAL_NC?
> > > > > > Would that be acceptable?
> > > > > 
> > > > > pgprot_device() needs to stay as Device, otherwise you'd get speculative
> > > > > reads with potential side-effects.
> > > > 
> > > > I do not mean to change pgprot_device() I mean to detect the
> > > > difference via pgprot_device() vs pgprot_noncached(). They put a
> > > > different value in the PTE that we can sense. It is very hacky.
> > > 
> > > Ah, ok, it does look hacky though (as is the alternative of coming up
> > > with a new specific pgprot_*() that KVM can treat differently).
> > > 
> > > BTW, on those Mellanox devices that require different attributes within
> > > a BAR, do they have a problem with speculative reads causing
> > > side-effects? 
> > 
> > Yes. We definitely have had that problem in the past on older
> > devices. VFIO must map the BAR using pgprot_device/noncached() into
> > the VMM, no other choice is functionally OK.
> 
> Were those BARs tagged as prefetchable or non-prefetchable ? I assume the
> latter but please let me know if I am guessing wrong.

I don't know it was quite old HW. Probably.

Just because a BAR is not marked as prefetchable doesn't mean that the
device can't use NORMAL_NC on subsets of it.

Jason