On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 09:28:53AM -0700, Shaohua Li wrote:
> IOMMU harms performance signficantly when we run very fast networking
> workloads. It's 40GB networking doing XDP test. Software overhead is
> almost unaware, but it's the IOTLB miss (based on our analysis) which
> kills the performance. We observed the same performance issue even with
> software passthrough (identity mapping), only the hardware passthrough
> survives. The pps with iommu (with software passthrough) is only about
> ~30% of that without it. This is a limitation in hardware based on our
> observation, so we'd like to disable the IOMMU force on, but we do want
> to use TBOOT and we can sacrifice the DMA security bought by IOMMU. I
> must admit I know nothing about TBOOT, but TBOOT guys (cc-ed) think not
> eabling IOMMU is totally ok.
>
> So introduce a new boot option to disable the force on. It's kind of
> silly we need to run into intel_iommu_init even without force on, but we
> need to disable TBOOT PMR registers. For system without the boot option,
> nothing is changed.
>
> Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <s...@fb.com>
> ---
> Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt | 5 +++++
> arch/x86/kernel/tboot.c | 3 +++
> drivers/iommu/intel-iommu.c | 21 ++++++++++++++++++++-
> include/linux/dma_remapping.h | 1 +
> 4 files changed, 29 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
Patch does not apply to my x86/vt-d branch.
> diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
> b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
> index facc20a..10c393b 100644
> --- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
> @@ -1578,6 +1578,11 @@
> extended tables themselves, and also PASID support. With
> this option set, extended tables will not be used even
> on hardware which claims to support them.
> + tboot_noforce [Default Off]
> + By default, tboot will force Intel IOMMU on, which
> + could harm performance for some workloads even IOMMU
> + identity mapping is enabled. This option will avoid
> + the 'force on' for Intel IOMMU.
Also the wording here should be more clear. How about:
> + Do not force the Intel IOMMU enabled under
> + tboot.
> + By default, tboot will force Intel IOMMU on, which
> + could harm performance of some high-throughput
> + devices like 40GBit network cards, even if
> + identity mapping is enabled.
> + Note that using this option lowers the security
> + provided by tboot because it makes the system
> + vulnerable to DMA attacks.
Regards,
Joerg
