Re: [PATCH V4 05/18] iommu/ioasid: Redefine IOASID set and allocation APIs

Jason Gunthorpe
2021-05-04T17:12:54Z

On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 06:58:19AM +0000, Tian, Kevin wrote:
> > From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2021 1:12 AM
> >
> [...]
> > > As Alex says, if this line fails because of the group restrictions,
> > > that's not great because it's not very obvious what's gone wrong.
> >
> > Okay, that is fair, but let's solve that problem directly. For
> > instance netlink has been going in the direction of adding a "extack"
> > from the kernel which is a descriptive error string. If the failing
> > ioctl returned the string:
> >
> > "cannot join this device to the IOASID because device XXX in the
> > same group #10 is in use"
> >
> > Would you agree it is now obvious what has gone wrong? In fact would
> > you agree this is a lot better user experience than what applications
> > do today even though they have the group FD?
> >
>
> Currently all the discussions are around implicit vs. explicit uAPI semantics
> on the group restriction. However if we look beyond group the implicit
> semantics might be inevitable when dealing with incompatible iommu
> domains. An existing example of iommu incompatibility is IOMMU_
> CACHE.

I still think we need to get rid of these incompatibilities
somehow. Having multiple HW incompatible IOASID in the same platform
is just bad all around.

When modeling in userspace IOMMU_CACHE sounds like it is a property of
each individual IOASID, not an attribute that requires a new domain.

People that want to create cache bypass IOASID's should just ask for
that that directly.

Jason