> From: David Gibson <da...@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
> Sent: Friday, May 6, 2022 1:25 PM
> 
> >
> > When the iommu_domain is created I want to have a
> > iommu-driver-specific struct, so PPC can customize its iommu_domain
> > however it likes.
> 
> This requires that the client be aware of the host side IOMMU model.
> That's true in VFIO now, and it's nasty; I was really hoping we could
> *stop* doing that.

that model is anyway inevitable when talking about user page table,
i.e. when nesting is enabled.

> 
> Note that I'm talking here *purely* about the non-optimized case where
> all updates to the host side IO pagetables are handled by IOAS_MAP /
> IOAS_COPY, with no direct hardware access to user or guest managed IO
> pagetables.  The optimized case obviously requires end-to-end
> agreement on the pagetable format amongst other domain properties.
> 
> What I'm hoping is that qemu (or whatever) can use this non-optimized
> as a fallback case where it does't need to know the properties of
> whatever host side IOMMU models there are.  It just requests what it
> needs based on the vIOMMU properties it needs to replicate and the
> host kernel either can supply it or can't.
> 
> In many cases it should be perfectly possible to emulate a PPC style
> vIOMMU on an x86 host, because the x86 IOMMU has such a colossal
> aperture that it will encompass wherever the ppc apertures end
> up. Similarly we could simulate an x86-style no-vIOMMU guest on a ppc
> host (currently somewhere between awkward and impossible) by placing
> the host apertures to cover guest memory.
> 
> Admittedly those are pretty niche cases, but allowing for them gives
> us flexibility for the future.  Emulating an ARM SMMUv3 guest on an
> ARM SMMU v4 or v5 or v.whatever host is likely to be a real case in
> the future, and AFAICT, ARM are much less conservative that x86 about
> maintaining similar hw interfaces over time.  That's why I think
> considering these ppc cases will give a more robust interface for
> other future possibilities as well.

It's not niche cases. We already have virtio-iommu which can work
on both ARM and x86 platforms, i.e. what current iommufd provides
is already generic enough except on PPC.

Then IMHO the key open here is:

Can PPC adapt to the current iommufd proposal if it can be
refactored to fit the standard iommu domain/group concepts?

If not, what is the remaining gap after PPC becomes a normal
citizen in the iommu layer and is it worth solving it in the general
interface or via iommu-driver-specific domain (given this will
exist anyway)?

to close that open I'm with Jason:

   "Fundamentally PPC has to fit into the iommu standard framework of
   group and domains, we can talk about modifications, but drifting too
   far away is a big problem."

Directly jumping to the iommufd layer for what changes might be
applied to all platforms sounds counter-intuitive if we haven't tried 
to solve the gap in the iommu layer in the first place, as even
there is argument that certain changes in iommufd layer can find
matching concept on other platforms it still sort of looks redundant
since those platforms already work with the current model.

My two cents.

Thanks
Kevin
_______________________________________________
iommu mailing list
iommu@lists.linux-foundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/iommu

Reply via email to