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

Jason Gunthorpe
2022-02-10T15:23:11Z

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 03:06:35PM +0100, Niklas Schnelle wrote:

> > How does the page pinning work?
>
> The pinning is done directly in the RPCIT interception handler pinning
> both the IOMMU tables and the guest pages mapped for DMA.

And if pinning fails?

> > Then the
> > magic kernel code you describe can operate on its own domain without
> > becoming confused with a normal map/unmap domain.
>
> This sounds like an interesting idea. Looking at
> drivers/iommu/s390_iommu.c most of that is pretty trivial domain
> handling. I wonder if we could share this by marking the existing
> s390_iommu_domain type with kind of a "lent out to KVM" flag.

Lu has posted a series here:

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-iommu/20220208012559.1121729-1-baolu.lu@linux.intel.com

Which allows the iommu driver to create a domain with unique ops, so
you'd just fork the entire thing, have your own struct
s390_kvm_iommu_domain and related ops.

When the special creation flow is triggered you'd just create one of
these with the proper ops already setup.

We are imagining a special ioctl to create these things and each IOMMU
HW driver can supply a unique implementation suited to their HW
design.

> KVM RPCIT intercept and vice versa. I.e. while the domain is under
> control of KVM's RPCIT handling we make all IOMMU map/unmap fail.

It is not "under the control of" the domain would be created as linked
to kvm and would never, ever, be anything else.

> To me this more direct involvement of IOMMU and KVM on s390x is also a
> direct consequence of it using special instructions. Naturally those
> instructions can be intercepted or run under hardware accelerated
> virtualization.

Well, no, you've just created a kernel-side SW emulated nested
translation scheme. Other CPUs have talked about doing this too, but
nobody has attempted it.

You can make the same argument for any CPU's scheme, a trapped mmio
store is not fundamentally any different from a special instruction
that traps, other than how the information is transferred.

> Yes very good analogy. Has any of that nested IOMMU translations work
> been merged yet?

No. We are making quiet progress, slowly though. I'll add your
interest to my list

> too. Basically we would then execute RPCIT without leaving the
> hardware virtualization mode (SIE). We believe that that would
> require pinning all of guest memory though because HW can't really
> pin pages.

Right, this is what other iommu HW will have to do.

Jason