Re: [RFC PATCH 06/21] vfio/pci: Accept live update preservation request for VFIO cdev

[Jacob Pan <jacob.pan@linux.microsoft.com>]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2025 10:28:55 -0300
Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 27, 2025 at 01:44:30PM -0700, Jacob Pan wrote:
> > I have a separate question regarding noiommu devices. I’m currently
> > working on adding noiommu mode support for VFIO cdev under iommufd.
> >  
> 
> Oh how is that going? I was just thinking about that again..
> 
I initially tried to create a special VFIO no-iommu iommu_domain
without an iommu driver, but I found it difficult without iommu_group
and other machinery. I also had a special vfio_device_ops
vfio_pci_noiommu_ops with special vfio_iommufd_noiommu_bind to create
iommufd_acess object as in Yi's original patch.

My current approach is that I have a special noiommu driver that handles
the special iommu_domain. It seems much cleaner though some extra code
overhead. I have a working prototype that has:
# tree /dev/vfio/    
/dev/vfio/           
|-- 7                
|-- devices          
|   `-- noiommu-vfio0
`-- vfio             

And the typical:
/sys/class/iommu/noiommu/
|-- devices
|   |-- 0000:00:00.0 -> ../../../../pci0000:00/0000:00:00.0
|   |-- 0000:00:01.0 -> ../../../../pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0
|   |-- 0000:00:02.0 -> ../../../../pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0
|   |-- 0000:00:03.0 -> ../../../../pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0
|   |-- 0000:00:04.0 -> ../../../../pci0000:00/0000:00:04.0
|   |-- 0000:00:05.0 -> ../../../../pci0000:00/0000:00:05.0
|   |-- 0000:01:00.0 -> ../../../../pci0000:00/0000:00:04.0/0000:0

The following user test can pass:
1. __iommufd = open("/dev/iommu", O_RDWR);
2. devfd = open a noiommu cdev
3. ioas_id = ioas_alloc(__iommufd)
4. iommufd_bind(__iommufd, devfd)
5. successfully do an ioas map, e.g.
ioctl(iommufd, IOMMU_IOAS_MAP, &map) 
This will call pfn_reader_user_pin() but the noiommu driver does
nothing for mapping.

I am still debugging some cases, would like to have a direction check
before going too far.

> After writing the generic pt self test it occured to me we now have
> enough infrastructure for iommufd to internally create its own
> iommu_domain with a AMDv1 page table for the noiommu devices. It would
> then be so easy to feed that through the existing machinery and have
> all the pinning/etc work.
> 
Could you elaborate a little more? noiommu devices don't have page
tables. Are you saying iommufd can create its own iommu_domain w/o a
vendor iommu driver? Let me catch up with your v7 :)

> Then only an ioctl to read back the physical addresses from this
> special domain would be needed
> 
Yes, that was part of your original suggestion to avoid /proc pagemap.
I have not added that yet. Do you think this warrant a new ioctl or
just return it in
	struct iommu_ioas_map map = {
		.size = sizeof(map),
		.flags = IOMMU_IOAS_MAP_READABLE,
		.ioas_id = ioas_id,
		.iova = iova,
		.user_va = uvaddr,
		.length = size,
	};

> It actually sort of feels pretty easy..
> 
> Jason