Re: [PATCH v3 24/30] vfio-pci/zdev: wire up group notifier

Jason Gunthorpe
2022-02-10T13:01:57Z

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 12:15:58PM +0100, Niklas Schnelle wrote:

> In a KVM or z/VM guest the guest is informed that IOMMU translations
> need to be refreshed even for previously invalid IOVAs. With this the
> guest builds it's IOMMU translation tables as normal but then does a
> RPCIT for the IOVA range it touched. In the hypervisor we can then
> simply walk the translation tables, pin the guest pages and map them in
> the host IOMMU. Prior to this series this happened in QEMU which does
> the map via vfio-iommu-type1 from user-space. This works and will
> remain as a fallback. Sadly it is quite slow and has a large impact on
> performance as we need to do a lot of mapping operations as the DMA API
> of the guest goes through the virtual IOMMU. This series thus adds the
> same functionality but as a KVM intercept of RPCIT. Now I think this
> neatly fits into KVM, we're emulating an instruction after all and most
> of its work is KVM specific pinning of guest pages. Importantly all
> other handling like IOMMU domain attachment still goes through vfio-
> iommu-type1 and we just fast path the map/unmap operations.

So you create an iommu_domain and then hand it over to kvm which then
does map/unmap operations on it under the covers?

How does the page pinning work?

In the design we are trying to reach I would say this needs to be
modeled as a special iommu_domain that has this automatic map/unmap
behavior from following user pages. Creating it would specify the kvm
and the in-guest base address of the guest's page table. Then the
magic kernel code you describe can operate on its own domain without
becoming confused with a normal map/unmap domain.

It is like the HW nested translation other CPUs are doing, but instead
of HW nested, it is SW nested.

Jason