Re: VFIO (PCI) and write combine mapping of BARs

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2023 at 04:15:39PM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > Assuming this is for #2, I think VFIO has fallen into a bit of a trap
> > by allowing userspace to form the mmap offset. I've seen this happen
> > in other subsystems too. It seems like a good idea then you realize
> > you need more stuff in the mmap space and become sad.
> > 
> > Typically the way out is to covert the mmap offset into a cookie where
> > userspace issues some ioctl and then the ioctl returns an opaque mmap
> > offset to use.
> > 
> > eg in the vfio context you'd do some 'prepare region for mmap' ioctl
> > where you could specify flags. The kernel would encode the flags in
> > the cookie and then mmap would do the right thing. Adding more stuff
> > is done by enhancing the prepare ioctl.
> > 
> > Legacy mmap offsets are kept working.
> 
> This indeed what I have in mind. IE. VFIO has legacy regions and add-on
> regions though the latter is currently only exploited by some drivers
> that create their own add-on regions. My proposal is to add an ioctl to
> create them from userspace as "children" of an existing driver-provided
> region, allowing to set different attributes for mmap.

I wouldn't call it children, you are just getting a different mmap
cookie for the same region object.
 
> In the current VFIO the implementation is *entirely* in vfio_pci_core
> for PCI and entirely in vfio_platform_common.c for platform, so while
> the same ioctls could be imagined to create sub-regions, it would have
> to be completely implemented twice unless we do a lot of heavy lifting
> to move some of that region stuff into common code.

The machinery for managing the mmap cookies should be in common code

Jason