Re: Inter-VM device emulation (call on Mon 20th July 2020)

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 11:30:24AM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote:
> 
> Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 11:49:04AM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote:
> >> Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com> writes:
> >> > 2. Alexander Graf's idea for a new Linux driver that provides an
> >> > enforcing software IOMMU. This would be a character device driver that
> >> > is mmapped by the device emulation process (either vhost-user-style on
> >> > the host or another VMM for inter-VM device emulation). The Driver VMM
> >> > can program mappings into the device and the page tables in the device
> >> > emulation process will be updated. This way the Driver VMM can share
> >> > memory specific regions of guest RAM with the device emulation process
> >> > and revoke those mappings later.
> >> 
> >> I'm wondering if there is enough plumbing on the guest side so a guest
> >> can use the virtio-iommu to mark out exactly which bits of memory the
> >> virtual device can have access to? At a minimum the virtqueues need to
> >> be accessible and for larger transfers maybe a bounce buffer. However
> >> for speed you want as wide as possible mapping but no more. It would be
> >> nice for example if a block device could load data directly into the
> >> guests block cache (zero-copy) but without getting a view of the kernels
> >> internal data structures.
> >
> > Maybe Jean-Philippe or Eric can answer that?
> >
> >> Another thing that came across in the call was quite a lot of
> >> assumptions about QEMU and Linux w.r.t virtio. While our project will
> >> likely have Linux as a guest OS we are looking specifically at enabling
> >> virtio for Type-1 hypervisors like Xen and the various safety certified
> >> proprietary ones. It is unlikely that QEMU would be used as the VMM for
> >> these deployments. We want to work out what sort of common facilities
> >> hypervisors need to support to enable virtio so the daemons can be
> >> re-usable and maybe setup with a minimal shim for the particular
> >> hypervisor in question.
> >
> > The vhost-user protocol together with the backend program conventions
> > define the wire protocol and command-line interface (see
> > docs/interop/vhost-user.rst).
> >
> > vhost-user is already used by other VMMs today. For example,
> > cloud-hypervisor implements vhost-user.
> 
> Ohh that's a new one for me. I see it is a KVM only project but it's
> nice to see another VMM using the common rust-vmm backend. There is
> interest in using rust-vmm to implement VMMs for type-1 hypervisors but
> we need to work out if there are two many type-2 concepts backed into
> the lower level rust crates.
> 
> > I'm sure there is room for improvement, but it seems like an incremental
> > step given that vhost-user already tries to cater for this scenario.
> >
> > Are there any specific gaps you have identified?
> 
> Aside from the desire to limit the shared memory footprint between the
> backend daemon and a guest not yet.

So it's certainly nice for security but not really a requirement for a
type-1 HV, right?

> I suspect the eventfd mechanism might just end up being simulated by the
> VMM as a result of whatever comes from the type-1 interface indicating a
> doorbell has been rung. It is after all just a FD you consume numbers
> over right?

Does not even have to be numbers. We need a way to be woken up, a way to
stop/start listening for wakeups and a way to detect that there was a
wakeup while we were not listening.

Though there are special tricks for offloads where we poke through
layers in order to map things directly to hardware.

> Not all setups will have an equivalent of a Dom0 "master" guest to do
> orchestration. Highly embedded are likely to have fixed domains created
> as the firmware/hypervisor start up.
> 
> >
> > Stefan
> 
> 
> -- 
> Alex Bennée