Re: [PATCH 2/5] vfio: Require that devices support DMA cache coherence

Alex Williamson
2022-04-05T22:39:52Z

On Tue, 5 Apr 2022 13:16:01 -0300
Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com> wrote:

> dev_is_dma_coherent() is the control to determine if IOMMU_CACHE can be
> supported.
>
> IOMMU_CACHE means that normal DMAs do not require any additional coherency
> mechanism and is the basic uAPI that VFIO exposes to userspace. For
> instance VFIO applications like DPDK will not work if additional coherency
> operations are required.
>
> Therefore check dev_is_dma_coherent() before allowing a device to join a
> domain. This will block device/platform/iommu combinations from using VFIO
> that do not support cache coherent DMA.
>
> Signed-off-by: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>
> ---
> drivers/vfio/vfio.c | 6 ++++++
> 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/drivers/vfio/vfio.c b/drivers/vfio/vfio.c
> index a4555014bd1e72..2a3aa3e742d943 100644
> --- a/drivers/vfio/vfio.c
> +++ b/drivers/vfio/vfio.c
> @@ -32,6 +32,7 @@
> #include <linux/vfio.h>
> #include <linux/wait.h>
> #include <linux/sched/signal.h>
> +#include <linux/dma-map-ops.h>
> #include "vfio.h"
>
> #define DRIVER_VERSION "0.3"
> @@ -1348,6 +1349,11 @@ static int vfio_group_get_device_fd(struct vfio_group *group, char *buf)
> if (IS_ERR(device))
> return PTR_ERR(device);
>
> + if (group->type == VFIO_IOMMU && !dev_is_dma_coherent(device->dev)) {
> + ret = -ENODEV;
> + goto err_device_put;
> + }
> +

Failing at the point where the user is trying to gain access to the
device seems a little late in the process and opaque, wouldn't we
rather have vfio bus drivers fail to probe such devices? I'd expect
this to occur in the vfio_register_group_dev() path. Thanks,

Alex

> if (!try_module_get(device->dev->driver->owner)) {
> ret = -ENODEV;
> goto err_device_put;