Re: [RFC 0/2] rust: introduce abstractions for fwctl

Danilo Krummrich
2025-10-30T17:52:37Z

On Thu Oct 30, 2025 at 6:29 PM CET, Zhi Wang wrote:
> On 30.10.2025 18.03, Zhi Wang wrote:
>> In the NVIDIA vGPU RFC [1], the vGPU type blobs must be provided to the GSP
>> before userspace can enumerate available vGPU types and create vGPU
>> instances. The original design relied on the firmware loading interface,
>> but fwctl is a more natural fit for this use case, as it is designed for
>> uploading configuration or firmware data required before the device becomes
>> operational.
>>
>
> Hi Jason and Danilo:
>
> Thanks for the comments. I had one more open to discuss, handling the buffer
> allocation/free between rust and C world.
>
> Two fwctl ioctls:
>
> FWCTL_CMD_INFO: The driver allocates the info memory (kmalloc) and the fwctl
> subsystem frees it.
>
> FWCTL_RPC:
>
> Case 1: The driver can choose to re-use the input buffer and write the *out_len
> for actual length of data.
>
> Case 2: The driver can allocate a new buffer (kmalloc) and the fwctl subsystem
> frees it.
>
> ----
> Now with the Rust driver:
>
> FWCTL_CMD_INFO: The rust side returns a new KVec, the rust fwctl abstraction
> consumes it, get void *buf and pass it to fwctl subsystem (C). The memory
> will be freed by C side.
>
> FWCTL_RPC:
>
> The input buffer will be wrapped in a mutable slice.
>
> Case 1: Re-use the input buffer. The rust side writes the mut slice and the
> * mut out_len.
>
> Case 2: Allocate the new output buffer. The same approach as FWCTL_CMD_INFO.
>
> ----
>
> We know KVec is backed by kmalloc. If C side changes the requirements of
> the driver memory allocation someday, E.g. from kfree() to kvfree() or vfree().
>
> Drivers in C will be updated surely at that time.
>
> Is possible that we can have some approaches to catch that change from the rust
> side via rust compiler for rust drivers?

I don't think we have the possibility of doing any compile time check here,
since on the C side the type is always void * for any memory allocation.

However, I think the only broken case would be if C switches to vmalloc() (and
hence vfree()), but the Rust code doesn't. That sounds unlikely to me for three
reasons.

(1) I think if there'd be a change it would be to kvmalloc() and calling
kvfree() on a kmalloc() buffer should be fine.

(2) A breaking change would also affect all C drivers, so it'd not only be the
Rust code being affected.