Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] KVM: arm64: allow the VM to select DEVICE_* and NORMAL_NC for IO memory

[Lorenzo Pieralisi <lpieralisi@kernel.org>]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 08:47:19AM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 12:21:50PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 08:51:42AM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 12:07:42PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > > Talking to Will earlier, I think we can deem the PCIe scenario
> > > > (somewhat) safe but not as a generic mechanism for other non-PCIe
> > > > devices (e.g. platform). With this concern, can we make this Stage 2
> > > > relaxation in KVM only for vfio-pci mappings? I don't have an example of
> > > > non-PCIe device assignment to figure out how this should work though.
> > > 
> > > It is not a KVM problem. As I implied above it is VFIO's
> > > responsibility to reliably reset the device, not KVMs. If for some
> > > reason VFIO cannot do that on some SOC then VFIO devices should not
> > > exist.
> > > 
> > > It is not KVM's job to double guess VFIO's own security properties.
> > 
> > I'd argue that since KVM is the one relaxing the memory attributes
> > beyond what the VFIO driver allows the VMM to use, it is KVM's job to
> > consider the security implications. This is fine for vfio-pci and
> > Normal_NC but I'm not sure we can generalise.
> 
> I can see that, but I belive we should take this responsibility into
> VFIO as a requirement. As I said in the other email we do want to
> extend VFIO to support NormalNC VMAs for DPDK, so we need to take this
> anyhow.
> 
> > > Specifically about platform the generic VFIO platform driver is the
> > > ACPI based one. If the FW provides an ACPI method for device reset
> > > that is not properly serializing, that is a FW bug. We can quirk it in
> > > VFIO and block using those devices if they actually exist.
> > > 
> > > I expect the non-generic VFIO platform drivers to take care of this
> > > issue internally with, barriers, read from devices, whatver is
> > > required to make their SOCs order properly. Just as I would expect a
> > > normal Linux platform driver to directly manage whatever
> > > implementation specific ordering quirks the SOC may have.
> > 
> > This would be a new requirement if an existing VFIO platform driver
> > relied on all mappings being Device. But maybe that's just theoretical
> > at the moment, are there any concrete examples outside vfio-pci? If not,
> > we can document it as per Lorenzo's suggestion to summarise this
> > discussion under Documentation/.
> 
> My point is if this becomes a real world concern we have a solid
> answer on how to resolve it - fix the VFIO driver to have a stronger
> barrier before reset.

Just to make sure I am parsing this correctly: this case above is
related to a non-PCI VFIO device passthrough where a guest would want to
map the device MMIO at stage-1 with normal-NC memory type (well, let's
say with a memory attribute != device-nGnRE - that combined with the new
stage-2 default might cause transactions ordering/grouping trouble with
eg device resets), correct ? IIRC, all requests related to honouring
"write-combine" style stage-1 mappings were for PCI(e) devices but
that's as far as what *I* was made aware of goes.

> I'm confident it is not a problem for PCI and IIRC the remaining ARM
> platform drivers were made primarily for DPDK, not KVM.
> 
> So I agree with documenting and perhaps a comment someplace in VFIO is
> also warranted.

We will do that, I will start adding the recent discussions to the
new documentation file. Side note: for those who attend LPC it would be
useful to review the resulting documentation together there, it should
happen around v6.7-rc1.

Lorenzo

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