Re: [PATCH] VFIO driver: Non-privileged user level PCI drivers

[Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>]

On 05/30/2010 03:49 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 03:27:05PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
>    
>> On 05/30/2010 03:19 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>>      
>>> On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 04:07:38PM -0700, Tom Lyon wrote:
>>>
>>>        
>>>> The VFIO "driver" is used to allow privileged AND non-privileged processes to
>>>> implement user-level device drivers for any well-behaved PCI, PCI-X, and PCIe
>>>> devices.
>>>> 	Signed-off-by: Tom Lyon<pugs@cisco.com>
>>>> ---
>>>> This patch is the evolution of code which was first proposed as a patch to
>>>> uio/uio_pci_generic, then as a more generic uio patch. Now it is taken entirely
>>>> out of the uio framework, and things seem much cleaner. Of course, there is
>>>> a lot of functional overlap with uio, but the previous version just seemed
>>>> like a giant mode switch in the uio code that did not lead to clarity for
>>>> either the new or old code.
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> IMO this was because this driver does two things: programming iommu and
>>> handling interrupts. uio does interrupt handling.
>>> We could have moved iommu / DMA programming to
>>> a separate driver, and have uio work with it.
>>> This would solve limitation of the current driver
>>> that is needs an iommu domain per device.
>>>
>>>        
>> How do we enforce security then?  We need to ensure that unprivileged
>> users can only use the device with an iommu.
>>      
> Force assigning to iommu before we allow any other operation?
>    

That means the driver must be aware of the iommu.

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