Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v5 02/18] vfio: introduce vfio_get_vaddr()

[Peter Xu]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 01:09:47PM -0700, Alex Williamson wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jan 2017 20:42:19 +0100
> Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > On 25/01/2017 19:36, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > >> It depends of what happens if they aren't.  I think it's fine (see other
> > >> message), but taking a reference for each mapping entry isn't so easy
> > >> because the unmap case doesn't know the old memory region.  
> > > If we held a reference to the memory region from the mapping path and
> > > walk the IOMMU page table to generate the unmap, then we really should
> > > get to the same original memory region, right?  The vfio iommu notifier
> > > should only be mapping native page sizes of the IOMMU, 4k/2M/1G.  The
> > > problem is that it's a lot of overhead to flush the entire address
> > > space that way vs the single invalidation Peter is trying to enable
> > > here.  It's actually similar to how the type1 iommu works in the kernel
> > > though, we can unmap by iova because we ask the iommu for the iova->pfn
> > > translation in order to unpin the page.  
> > 
> > But in the kernel you can trust the IOMMU page tables because you build
> > them, here instead it's the guest's page tables that you'd walk, right?
> > You cannot trust the guest.
> 
> Yes, you're right, we're not shadowing the vt-d page tables, we're
> working on the explicit invalidation model.  So there could be
> anything, or nothing in the page tables when we go to try to lookup the
> unref.  So clearly taking that reference without a shadow page table
> would be the wrong approach.  Thanks,

IIUC of above discussion, moving rcu read lock/unlock out of
vfio_get_vaddr() would be the nicest approach here.

Thanks to you both on helping verify and confirm the problem!

-- peterx