Re: [PATCH 1 of 7] x86: add _PAGE_IOMAP pte flag for IO mappings

Avi Kivity
2008-09-09T14:56:45Z

Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Avi Kivity wrote:
>
>> Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
>>
>>> Use one of the software-defined PTE bits to indicate that a mapping is
>>> intended for an IO address. On native hardware this is irrelevent,
>>> since a physical address is a physical address. But in a virtual
>>> environment, physical addresses are also virtualized, so there needs
>>> to be some way to distinguish between pseudo-physical addresses and
>>> actual hardware addresses; _PAGE_IOMAP indicates this intent.
>>>
>>> By default, __supported_pte_mask masks out _PAGE_IOMAP, so it doesn't
>>> even appear in the final pagetable.
>>>
>>>
>> Could PTE_SPECIAL, added for get_user_pages_really_fast(), be reused
>> for this?
>>
>>
>
> I'm not sure; I still don't really understand how _PAGE_SPECIAL gets
> used, other than being user-mode mapping only. But in principle,
> _PAGE_IOMAP could be set on both kernel and user mappings (if you direct
> map a device into a process address space), so I think they would
> conflict then?
>
>

It's a "don't refcount me" flag, which is not sematically the same as
I/O, but may be close enough.

> Is _PAGE_IOMAP at all useful for device passthrough in kvm?
>

No. We don't care if a page is an I/O page or RAM (other than
refcounting correctness and page attributes, which are handled by other
means).

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