Re: [PATCH 0/4] dma-buf: add revoke mechanism to invalidate shared buffers

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca>]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 01:57:25PM +0100, Christian König wrote:
> Clear NAK to that plan. This is not something DMA-buf should need to
> deal with and as far as I can see is incompatible with the UAPI.

We had this discussion with Simona and you a while back and there was
a pretty clear direction we needed to add a revoke to sit inbetween
pin and move. I think Leon has no quite got the "dmabuf lingo" down
right to explain this.

 https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/Z4Z4NKqVG2Vbv98Q@phenom.ffwll.local/

   Since you mention pin here, I think that's another aspect of the revocable
   vs dynamic question. Dynamic buffers are expected to sometimes just move
   around for no reason, and importers must be able to cope.

   For recovable exporters/importers I'd expect that movement is not
   happening, meaning it's pinned until the single terminal revocation. And
   maybe I read the kvm stuff wrong, but it reads more like the latter to me
   when crawling through the pfn code.

The issue is that DMABUF only offers two attachment options today, pin
and move. iommufd/kvm can implement pin, but not move because they
don't support faulting.

vfio and others don't need move with faulting but they do need pin
with a terminal, emergency, revocation.

The purpose of revoke is to add a new negotiated attachment mode
between exporter and importer that behaves the same as pin up until
the user does something catastrophic (like ubind a driver) then a
revoke invalidation is used to clean everything up safely.

You are right that the existing move_notify already meets this
semantic, and today VFIO exporter, RDMA ODP importer even implement
this. Upon VFIO revoke move_notify() will invalidate and map() will
fail. RDMA ODP then HW fails all faults.

The problem revoke is designed to solve is that many importers have
hardware that can either be DMA'ing or failing. There is no fault
mechanims that can be used to implement the full "move around for no
reason" semantics that are implied by move_notify.

Thus they can't implement move_notify!

Revoke allows this less capable HW to still be usable with exporters,
so long as exporters promise only to issue an invalidation for a
"single terminal revocation". Which does nicely match the needs of
exporters which are primarily pin based.

IOW this is an enhancement to pin modes to add a terminal error case
invalidation to pinned attachments.

It is not intended to be UAPI changing, and Leon is not trying to say
that importers have to drop their attachment. The attachment just
becomes permanently non-present.

Jason