Re: [Qemu-devel] [iGVT-g] <summary> RE: VFIO based vGPU(was Re: [Announcement] 2015-Q3 release of XenGT - a Mediated ...)

[Jike Song <jike.song@intel.com>]

On 02/04/2016 12:16 PM, Tian, Kevin wrote:
>>>>> 5) Pin/unpin guest memory
>>>>> --
>>>>> IGD or any PCI passthru should have same requirement. So we should be
>>>>> able to leverage existing code in VFIO. The only tricky thing (Jike may
>>>>> elaborate after he is back), is that KVMGT requires to pin EPT entry too,
>>>>> which requires some further change in KVM side. But I'm not sure whether
>>>>> it still holds true after some design changes made in this thread. So I'll
>>>>> leave to Jike to further comment.
>>>>
>>>> PCI assignment requires pinning all of guest memory, I would think that
>>>> IGD would only need to pin selective memory, so is this simply stating
>>>> that both have the need to pin memory, not that they'll do it to the
>>>> same extent?
>>>
>>> For simplicity let's first pin all memory, while taking selective pinning as a
>>> future enhancement.
>>>
>>> The tricky thing is that existing 'pin' action in VFIO doesn't actually pin
>>> EPT entry too (only pin host page tables for Qemu process). There are
>>> various places where EPT entries might be invalidated when guest is
>>> running, while KVMGT requires EPT entries to be pinned too. Let's wait
>>> for Jike to elaborate whether this part is still required today.
>>
>> Sorry, don't quite follow the logic here. The current VFIO TYPE1 IOMMU (including API
>> and underlying IOMMU implementation) will pin the guest physical memory and
>> install those pages to the proper device domain. Yes, it is only for the QEMU
>> process as that is what the VM is running at.
>>
>> Do I miss something here?
> 
> For Qemu there are two page tables involved: one is host page table as
> you mentioned here for root mode, the other is EPT page table used
> as the 2nd level translation when guest is running in non-root mode. I'm
> not sure why KVMGT requires to pin EPT entry. Jike should know better
> here.
> 

There may be some misunderstanding here - KVMGT doesn't need to pin EPT
entries. Previously I mentioned spte pinning, only because that, at that
time we wanted to query pfn for a given gfn by KVM MMU (rmap + spte). Now
we have better way of this.

I promise this is not a problem :)


--
Thanks,
Jike