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

[Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>]

On 06/02/2010 01:04 PM, Joerg Roedel wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 12:49:28PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
>    
>> On 06/02/2010 12:45 PM, Joerg Roedel wrote:
>>      
>>> IOMMU mapped memory can not be swapped out because we can't do demand
>>> paging on io-page-faults with current devices. We have to pin _all_
>>> userspace memory that is mapped into an IOMMU domain.
>>>        
>> vhost doesn't pin memory.
>>
>> What I proposed is to describe the memory map using an object (fd), and
>> pass it around to clients that use it: kvm, vhost, vfio.  That way you
>> maintain the memory map in a central location and broadcast changes to
>> clients.  Only a vfio client would result in memory being pinned.
>>      
> Ah ok, so its only about the database which keeps the mapping
> information.
>    

Yes.

>    
>> It can still work, but the interface needs to be extended to include
>> dirty bitmap logging.
>>      
> Thats hard to do. I am not sure about VT-d but the AMD IOMMU has no
> dirty-bits in the page-table. And without demand-paging we can't really
> tell what pages a device has written to. The only choice is to mark all
> IOMMU-mapped pages dirty as long as they are mapped.
>
>    

The interface would only work for clients which support it: kvm, vhost, 
and iommu/devices with restartable dma.

Note dirty logging is not very interesting for vfio anyway, since you 
can't live migrate with assigned devices.

-- 
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