Re: [RFC 10/20] iommu/iommufd: Add IOMMU_DEVICE_GET_INFO

Jason Gunthorpe via iommu
2021-10-21T23:22:33Z

On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 03:58:02PM +0100, Jean-Philippe Brucker wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 02:26:00AM +0000, Tian, Kevin wrote:
> > > I'll leave it to Jean to confirm. If only coherent DMA can be used in
> > > the guest on other platforms, suppose VFIO should not blindly set
> > > IOMMU_CACHE and in concept it should deny assigning a non-coherent
> > > device since no co-ordination with guest exists today.
> >
> > Jean, what's your opinion?
>
> Yes a sanity check to prevent assigning non-coherent devices would be
> good, though I'm not particularly worried about non-coherent devices. PCIe
> on Arm should be coherent (according to the Base System Architecture). So
> vfio-pci devices should be coherent, but vfio-platform and mdev are
> case-by-case (hopefully all coherent since it concerns newer platforms).
>
> More worrying, I thought we disabled No-Snoop for VFIO but I was wrong,
> it's left enabled. On Arm I don't think userspace can perform the right
> cache maintenance operations to maintain coherency with a device that
> issues No-Snoop writes. Userspace can issue clean+invalidate but not
> invalidate alone, so there is no equivalent to
> arch_sync_dma_for_cpu().

So what happens in a VM? Does a VM know that arch_sync_dma_for_cpu()
is not available?

And how does this work with the nested IOMMU translation? I thought I
read in the SMMU spec that the io page table entries could control
cachability including in nesting cases?

> I think the worse that can happen is the device owner shooting itself in
> the foot by using No-Snoop, but would it hurt to disable it?

No, the worst is the same as Intel - a driver running in the guest VM
assumes it can use arch_sync_dma_for_cpu() and acts accordingly,
resulting in a broken VM.

Jason