RE: [RFC PATCH] virtio_ring: Use DMA API if guest memory is encrypted

Ram Pai
2019-08-12T20:29:38Z

On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 02:13:24PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 11:46:21PM -0700, Ram Pai wrote:
> > If the hypervisor (hardware for hw virtio devices) does not mandate a
> > DMA API, why is it illegal for the driver to request, special handling
> > of its i/o buffers? Why are we associating this special handling to
> > always mean, some DMA address translation? Can't there be
> > any other kind of special handling needs, that has nothing to do with
> > DMA address translation?
>
> I don't think it is illegal per se. It is however completely broken
> if we do that decision on a system weide scale rather than properly
> requesting it through a per-device flag in the normal virtio framework.

if the decision has to be system-wide; for reasons known locally only to the
kernel/driver, something that is independent of any device-flag,
what would be the mechanism?

RP