Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH for 2.8 10/11] Revert "intel_iommu: Throw hw_error on notify_started"

[Peter Xu]

On Fri, Sep 02, 2016 at 05:00:28PM +1000, David Gibson wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Sep 2016 14:18:47 +0800
> Peter Xu <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Sep 02, 2016 at 02:15:57PM +0800, Peter Xu wrote:
> > > > No, implement the full notifier, and a listener which only wants the
> > > > invalidates can just ignore callbacks which add new mappings.
> > > > 
> > > > As I said, you'll need this to get VFIO working with vIOMMU which
> > > > someone is bound to want soon enough anyway.  
> > > 
> > > But for vhost cases, we do not need CM bit enabled. That might be the
> > > difference?
> > > 
> > > I think we need to have vhost working even without CM bit. Device
> > > IOTLB should be able to achieve that.  
> > 
> > The problem is that, IMHO we should be very careful on enabling CM
> > bit. After enabling it, system might get slower (though I haven't
> > tried it yet), or even very slow? So maybe we will only enable it when
> > really needed (e.g., to do device passthrough and build the shadow
> > table).
> 
> Um.. what's the CM bit and what does it have to do with anything?

It's used to trace guest IO address space mapping changes.

Pasted from VT-d spec chap 6.1:

    The Caching Mode (CM) field in Capability Register indicates if
    the hardware implementation caches not-present or erroneous
    translation-structure entries. When the CM field is reported as
    Set, any software updates to any remapping structures (including
    updates to not-present entries or present entries whose
    programming resulted in translation faults) requires explicit
    invalidation of the caches.

    Hardware implementations of this architecture must support
    operation corresponding to CM=0. Operation corresponding to CM=1
    may be supported by software implementations (emulation) of this
    architecture for efficient virtualization of remapping hardware.
    Software managing remapping hardware should be written to handle
    both caching modes.

    Software implementations virtualizing the remapping architecture
    (such as a VMM emulating remapping hardware to an operating system
    running within a guest partition) may report CM=1 to efficiently
    virtualize the hardware. Software virtualization typically
    requires the guest remapping structures to be shadowed in the
    host. Reporting the Caching Mode as Set for the virtual hardware
    requires the guest software to explicitly issue invalidation
    operations on the virtual hardware for any/all updates to the
    guest remapping structures. The virtualizing software may trap
    these guest invalidation operations to keep the shadow translation
    structures consistent to guest translation structure
    modifications, without resorting to other less efficient
    techniques (such as write-protecting the guest translation
    structures through the processor’s paging facility).

Currently it is not supported for Intel vIOMMUs.

-- peterx