Re: [RFC for-4.8 0/6] xen/arm: Add support for mapping mmio-sram nodes into dom0

[Julien Grall <julien.grall@arm.com>]

Hello Edgar,

I have CCed a couple of people from ARM to get more input on it.

On 20/05/16 16:51, Edgar E. Iglesias wrote:
> From: "Edgar E. Iglesias" <edgar.iglesias@xilinx.com>
>
> This series adds support for mapping mmio-sram nodes into dom0
> as MEMORY, cached and with RWX perms.

Can you explain why you chose to map those nodes as MEMORY, cached and 
with RWX perms?

>
> Dom0 can then choose to further restrict these mappings if needed.
> We only look at the outer mmio-sram region. The sub-area nodes that
> describe allocations within the mmio-sram region are only meaningful
> to the guest AFAICT.
>
> In an attempt to avoid growing the already fairly large domain_build.c
> file, I've tried to implement a distributed way to deal with these kind
> of special/custom mapping needs. These can live outside of domain_build.c
> and are registerd by means of a .map method in the device_spec.
>
> If this approach is not good, I'm happy to bin it and try something else.

We will have a similar problem when using ACPI for DOM0 or mapping a 
such MMIO to the guest. The hypercalls XENMAPSPACE_dev_mmio and 
XEN_DOMCTL_memory_mapping do not provide enough information to know the 
attribute to be used for mapping.

MMIO are always mapped in Stage-2 with Device_nGnRE, which is quite 
restrictive. This would also impact any MMIO regions, such as the video 
RAM buffer, that could be mapped write-combine.

After reading the ARM ARM (B2.8.2 ARM DII 0486.i), I think we could 
relax the stage-2 mapping by using Device_GRE for all the device MMIOs 
but the GIC.

We have to keep the GIC MMIO with the most restrictive memory attribute 
to avoid potential side-effect when Xen is switching between multiple 
vCPUs. All the other devices will be exclusive to a specific guest, so 
the guest can handle the device the way it wants. This may require some 
extra-care when reassigning the device to another domain.

Edgar, would Device_GRE be fine for you?

Note, that XENMAPSPACE_dev_mmio has been introduced in Xen 4.7 (which is 
due in a couple of weeks) and part of the stable ABI. So if it is not 
possible to relax the memory attribute, it might be worth to think 
fixing/reverting the hypercall for 4.7. Otherwise we would have to 
introduce a new one in the next release.

Regards,

-- 
Julien Grall

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