Re: [PATCH 01/11] iommu: Add device dma ownership set/release interfaces

Jason Gunthorpe
2021-11-19T15:43:22Z

On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 04:06:12PM +0100, Jörg Rödel wrote:

> This change came to be because the iommu_attach/detach_device()
> interface doesn't fit well into a world with iommu-groups. Devices
> within a group are by definition not isolated between each other, so
> they must all be in the same address space (== iommu_domain). So it
> doesn't make sense to allow attaching a single device within a group to
> a different iommu_domain.

It is the same problem VFIO has. It changes the iommu_domain of a
group while it only has a single driver bound to one device in the
group.

Robin is also right to point out there is no guarentee that a single
device group will remain a single device group after a hot plug
event. This is something VFIO is also able to handle today.

So, I think the solution of this series applies equally well to this
problem. Let's see it in v2.

> I know that in theory it is safe to allow devices within a group to be
> in different domains because there iommu-groups catch multiple
> non-isolation cases:
>
> 1) Devices behind a non-ACS capable bridge or multiple functions
> of a PCI device. Here it is safe to put the devices into
> different iommu-domains as long as all affected devices are
> controlled by the same owner.
>
> 2) Devices which share a single request-id and can't be
> differentiated by the IOMMU hardware. These always need to be
> in the same iommu_domain.

> To lift the single-domain-per-group requirement the iommu core code
> needs to learn the difference between the two cases above.

We had a long talk about this a while back, nobody came with
compelling arguments to justify doing this work. I've just been using
it as a guidepost for building APIs. If the API can accomodate #1 then
it is a better design than one that cannot.

Jason