Subject: [PATCH v4 2/7] iommu/core: split mapping to page sizes as supported by the hardware

From: [email-masked] (Joerg Roedel)
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:58:37 +0100

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 07:28:39PM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:

> ... which implies that a mapping, once made, might *never* actually get
> torn down until we loop and start reusing address space? That has
> interesting security implications.

Yes, it is a trade-off between security and performance. But if the user
wants more security the unmap_flush parameter can be used.

> Is it true even for devices which have been assigned to a VM and then
> unassigned?

No, this is only used in the DMA-API path. The device-assignment code
uses the IOMMU-API directly. There the IOTLB is always flushed on unmap.

> > There is something similar on the AMD IOMMU side. There it is called
> > unmap_flush.
> 
> OK, so that definitely wants consolidating into a generic option.

Agreed.

> > Some time ago I proposed the iommu_commit() interface which changes
> > these requirements. With this interface the requirement is that after a
> > couple of map/unmap operations the IOMMU-API user has to call
> > iommu_commit() to make these changes visible to the hardware (so mostly
> > sync the IOTLBs). As discussed at that time this would make sense for
> > the Intel and AMD IOMMU drivers.
> 
> I would *really* want to keep those off the fast path (thinking mostly
> about DMA API here, since that's the performance issue). But as long as
> we can achieve that, that's fine.

For AMD IOMMU there is a feature called not-present cache. It says that
the IOMMU caches non-present entries as well and needs an IOTLB flush
when something is mapped (meant for software implementations of the
IOMMU).
So it can't be really taken out of the fast-path. But the IOMMU driver
can optimize the function so that it only flushes the IOTLB when there
was an unmap-call before. It is also an improvement over the current
situation where every iommu_unmap call results in a flush implicitly.
This pretty much a no-go for using IOMMU-API in DMA mapping at the
moment.

> But also, it's not *so* much of an issue to divide the space up even
> when it's limited. The idea was not to have it *strictly* per-CPU, but
> just for a CPU to try allocating from "its own" subrange first, and then
> fall back to allocating a new subrange, and *then* fall back to
> allocating from subranges "belonging" to other CPUs. It's not that the
> allocation from a subrange would be lockless ? it's that the lock would
> almost never leave the l1 cache of the CPU that *normally* uses that
> subrange.

Yeah, I get the idea. I fear that the memory consumption will get pretty
high with that approach. It basically means one round-robin allocator
per cpu and device. What does that mean on a 4096 CPU machine :)
How much lock contention will be lowered also depends on the work-load.
If dma-handles are frequently freed from another cpu than they were
allocated from the same problem re-appears.
But in the end we have to try it out and see what works best :)

Regards,

	Joerg

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