Subject: Re: [PATCH v9 12/13] KVM: PPC: Add support for IOMMU in-kernel handling

From: Alexey Kardashevskiy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 17:04:58 +1000

On 09/06/2013 04:57 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 05, 2013 at 02:05:09PM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>> On Tue, 2013-09-03 at 13:53 +0300, Gleb Natapov wrote:
>>>> Or supporting all IOMMU links (and leaving emulated stuff as is) in on
>>>> "device" is the last thing I have to do and then you'll ack the patch?
>>>>
>>> I am concerned more about API here. Internal implementation details I
>>> leave to powerpc experts :)
>>
>> So Gleb, I want to step in for a bit here.
>>
>> While I understand that the new KVM device API is all nice and shiny and that this
>> whole thing should probably have been KVM devices in the first place (had they
>> existed or had we been told back then), the point is, the API for handling
>> HW IOMMUs that Alexey is trying to add is an extension of an existing mechanism
>> used for emulated IOMMUs.
>>
>> The internal data structure is shared, and fundamentally, by forcing him to
>> use that new KVM device for the "new stuff", we create a oddball API with
>> an ioctl for one type of iommu and a KVM device for the other, which makes
>> the implementation a complete mess in the kernel (and you should care :-)
>>
> Is it unfixable mess? Even if Alexey will do what you suggested earlier?
> 
>   - Convert *both* existing TCE objects to the new
>       KVM_CREATE_DEVICE, and have some backward compat code for the old one.

If we convert *old*, then for compatibility we will need one KVM device
(more precisely, one fd) per an TCE object (not one for all TCE objects) as
the guest (upstream QEMU) will mmap the table via mmap() and it won't use
any offset when mapping this fd.

The current KVM device implementation does not even support mmap().

So I would go with the KVM device patch I posted and really want to avoid
putting all TCEs into one device.

> The point is implementation usually can be changed, but for API it is
> much harder to do so.
> 
>> So for something completely new, I would tend to agree with you. However, I
>> still think that for this specific case, we should just plonk-in the original
>> ioctl proposed by Alexey and be done with it.
>>
> Do you think this is the last extension to IOMMU code, or we will see
> more and will use same justification to continue adding ioctls?

-- 
Alexey