Re: [PATCH 2/2] uio: new driver to support PCI MSI-X

Michael S. Tsirkin
2015-10-05T21:55:00Z

On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 11:33:06AM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> Just forwarding events is not enough to make a valid driver.
> What is missing is a way to access the device in a safe way.

Thinking about it some more, maybe some devices don't do DMA, and merely
signal events with MSI/MSI-X.

The fact you mention igb_uio in the cover letter seems to hint that this
isn't the case, and that the real intent is to abuse it for DMA-capable
devices, but still ...

If we assume such a simple device, we need to block userspace from
tweaking at least the MSI control and the MSI-X table.
And changing BARs might make someone else corrupt the MSI-X
table, so we need to block it from changing BARs, too.

Things like device reset will clear the table. I guess this means we
need to track access to reset, too, make sure we restore the
table to a sane config.

PM capability can be used to reset things tooI think. Better be
careful about that.

And a bunch of devices could be doing weird things that need
to be special-cased.

All of this is what VFIO is already dealing with.

Maybe extending VFIO for this usecase, or finding another way to share
code might be a better idea than duplicating the code within uio?

--
MST