Multiple vIOMMU instance support in QEMU?

[Nicolin Chen]

Hi all,

(Please feel free to include related folks into this thread.)

In light of an ongoing nested-IOMMU support effort via IOMMUFD, we
would likely have a need of a multi-vIOMMU support in QEMU, or more
specificly a multi-vSMMU support for an underlying HW that has multi
physical SMMUs. This would be used in the following use cases.
 1) Multiple physical SMMUs with different feature bits so that one
    vSMMU enabling a nesting configuration cannot reflect properly.
 2) NVIDIA Grace CPU has a VCMDQ HW extension for SMMU CMDQ. Every
    VCMDQ HW has an MMIO region (CONS and PROD indexes) that should
    be exposed to a VM, so that a hypervisor can avoid trappings by
    using this HW accelerator for performance. However, one single
    vSMMU cannot mmap multiple MMIO regions from multiple pSMMUs.
 3) With the latest iommufd design, a single vIOMMU model shares the
    same stage-2 HW pagetable across all physical SMMUs with a shared
    VMID. Then a stage-1 pagetable invalidation (for one device) at
    the vSMMU would have to be broadcasted to all the SMMU instances,
    which would hurt the overall performance.

I previously discussed with Eric this topic in a private email. Eric
felt the difficulty of implementing this in the current QEMU system,
as it would touch different subsystems like IORT and platform device,
since the passthrough devices would be attached to different vIOMMUs.

Yet, given the situations above, it's likely the best by duplicating
the vIOMMU instance corresponding to the number of the physical SMMU
instances.

So, I am sending this email to collect opinions on this and see what
would be a potential TODO list if we decide to go on this path.

Thanks
Nicolin