Re: (proposal) RE: [PATCH v7 00/16] vfio: expose virtual Shared Virtual Addressing to VMs

Jason Wang
2020-10-13T06:23:10Z

On 2020/10/12 下午4:38, Tian, Kevin wrote:
>> From: Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com>
>> Sent: Monday, September 14, 2020 12:20 PM
>>
> [...]
> > If it's possible, I would suggest a generic uAPI instead of a VFIO
>> specific one.
>>
>> Jason suggest something like /dev/sva. There will be a lot of other
>> subsystems that could benefit from this (e.g vDPA).
>>
>> Have you ever considered this approach?
>>
> Hi, Jason,
>
> We did some study on this approach and below is the output. It's a
> long writing but I didn't find a way to further abstract w/o losing
> necessary context. Sorry about that.
>
> Overall the real purpose of this series is to enable IOMMU nested
> translation capability with vSVA as one major usage, through
> below new uAPIs:
> 1) Report/enable IOMMU nested translation capability;
> 2) Allocate/free PASID;
> 3) Bind/unbind guest page table;
> 4) Invalidate IOMMU cache;
> 5) Handle IOMMU page request/response (not in this series);
> 1/3/4) is the minimal set for using IOMMU nested translation, with
> the other two optional. For example, the guest may enable vSVA on
> a device without using PASID. Or, it may bind its gIOVA page table
> which doesn't require page fault support. Finally, all operations can
> be applied to either physical device or subdevice.
>
> Then we evaluated each uAPI whether generalizing it is a good thing
> both in concept and regarding to complexity.
>
> First, unlike other uAPIs which are all backed by iommu_ops, PASID
> allocation/free is through the IOASID sub-system.

A question here, is IOASID expected to be the single management
interface for PASID?

(I'm asking since there're already vendor specific IDA based PASID
allocator e.g amdgpu_pasid_alloc())

> From this angle
> we feel generalizing PASID management does make some sense.
> First, PASID is just a number and not related to any device before
> it's bound to a page table and IOMMU domain. Second, PASID is a
> global resource (at least on Intel VT-d),

I think we need a definition of "global" here. It looks to me for vt-d
the PASID table is per device.

Another question, is this possible to have two DMAR hardware unit(at
least I can see two even in my laptop). In this case, is PASID still a
global resource?

> while having separate VFIO/
> VDPA allocation interfaces may easily cause confusion in userspace,
> e.g. which interface to be used if both VFIO/VDPA devices exist.
> Moreover, an unified interface allows centralized control over how
> many PASIDs are allowed per process.

Yes.

>
> One unclear part with this generalization is about the permission.
> Do we open this interface to any process or only to those which
> have assigned devices? If the latter, what would be the mechanism
> to coordinate between this new interface and specific passthrough
> frameworks?

I'm not sure, but if you just want a permission, you probably can
introduce new capability (CAP_XXX) for this.

> A more tricky case, vSVA support on ARM (Eric/Jean
> please correct me) plans to do per-device PASID namespace which
> is built on a bind_pasid_table iommu callback to allow guest fully
> manage its PASIDs on a given passthrough device.

I see, so I think the answer is to prepare for the namespace support
from the start. (btw, I don't see how namespace is handled in current
IOASID module?)

> I'm not sure
> how such requirement can be unified w/o involving passthrough
> frameworks, or whether ARM could also switch to global PASID
> style...
>
> Second, IOMMU nested translation is a per IOMMU domain
> capability. Since IOMMU domains are managed by VFIO/VDPA
> (alloc/free domain, attach/detach device, set/get domain attribute,
> etc.), reporting/enabling the nesting capability is an natural
> extension to the domain uAPI of existing passthrough frameworks.
> Actually, VFIO already includes a nesting enable interface even
> before this series. So it doesn't make sense to generalize this uAPI
> out.

So my understanding is that VFIO already:

1) use multiple fds
2) separate IOMMU ops to a dedicated container fd (type1 iommu)
3) provides API to associated devices/group with a container

And all the proposal in this series is to reuse the container fd. It
should be possible to replace e.g type1 IOMMU with a unified module.

>
> Then the tricky part comes with the remaining operations (3/4/5),
> which are all backed by iommu_ops thus effective only within an
> IOMMU domain. To generalize them, the first thing is to find a way
> to associate the sva_FD (opened through generic /dev/sva) with an
> IOMMU domain that is created by VFIO/VDPA. The second thing is
> to replicate {domain<->device/subdevice} association in /dev/sva
> path because some operations (e.g. page fault) is triggered/handled
> per device/subdevice.

Is there any reason that the #PF can not be handled via SVA fd?

> Therefore, /dev/sva must provide both per-
> domain and per-device uAPIs similar to what VFIO/VDPA already
> does. Moreover, mapping page fault to subdevice requires pre-
> registering subdevice fault data to IOMMU layer when binding
> guest page table, while such fault data can be only retrieved from
> parent driver through VFIO/VDPA.
>
> However, we failed to find a good way even at the 1st step about
> domain association. The iommu domains are not exposed to the
> userspace, and there is no 1:1 mapping between domain and device.
> In VFIO, all devices within the same VFIO container share the address
> space but they may be organized in multiple IOMMU domains based
> on their bus type. How (should we let) the userspace know the
> domain information and open an sva_FD for each domain is the main
> problem here.

The SVA fd is not necessarily opened by userspace. It could be get
through subsystem specific uAPIs.

E.g for vDPA if a vDPA device contains several vSVA-capable domains, we can:

1) introduce uAPI for userspace to know the number of vSVA-capable domain
2) introduce e.g VDPA_GET_SVA_FD to get the fd for each vSVA-capable domain

>
> In the end we just realized that doing such generalization doesn't
> really lead to a clear design and instead requires tight coordination
> between /dev/sva and VFIO/VDPA for almost every new uAPI
> (especially about synchronization when the domain/device
> association is changed or when the device/subdevice is being reset/
> drained). Finally it may become a usability burden to the userspace
> on proper use of the two interfaces on the assigned device.
>
> Based on above analysis we feel that just generalizing PASID mgmt.
> might be a good thing to look at while the remaining operations are
> better being VFIO/VDPA specific uAPIs. anyway in concept those are
> just a subset of the page table management capabilities that an
> IOMMU domain affords. Since all other aspects of the IOMMU domain
> is managed by VFIO/VDPA already, continuing this path for new nesting
> capability sounds natural. There is another option by generalizing the
> entire IOMMU domain management (sort of the entire vfio_iommu_
> type1), but it's unclear whether such intrusive change is worthwhile
> (especially when VFIO/VDPA already goes different route even in legacy
> mapping uAPI: map/unmap vs. IOTLB).
>
> Thoughts?

I'm ok with starting with a unified PASID management and consider the
unified vSVA/vIOMMU uAPI later.

Thanks

>
> Thanks
> Kevin