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

[Alex Williamson]

On Fri, 2 Sep 2016 17:31:00 +0800
Peter Xu <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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.

Maybe memory_region_register_iommu_notifier() could take an
IOMMUAccessFlags argument (filter) that is passed to the notify_started
callback.  If a notifier client only cares about IOMMU_NONE
(invalidations), intel-iommu could allow it, regardless of the CM
setting (though I'm dubious whether this is complete in the generic
case or really only for device iotlbs).  If a client requires IOMMU_RW
then intel-iommu would currently bomb-out like it does now, or once
that gets fixed it would bomb if CM=0.  Ideally intel-iommu would
be fully functional, but somehow it was allowed into the tree
with this massive gap in support for QEMU iommu interfaces.  Thanks,

Alex