Re: [RFC PATCH 3/3] kvm: Add VFIO device for handling IOMMU cachecoherency

[Gleb Natapov]

On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 07:52:28AM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> On Sun, 2013-09-29 at 16:16 +0300, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 03:23:15PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > > So far we've succeeded at making KVM and VFIO mostly unaware of each
> > > other, but there's any important point where that breaks down.  Intel
> > > VT-d hardware may or may not support snoop control.  When snoop
> > > control is available, intel-iommu promotes No-Snoop transactions on
> > > PCIe to be cache coherent.  That allows KVM to handle things like the
> > > x86 WBINVD opcode as a nop.  When the hardware does not support this,
> > > KVM must implement a hardware visible WBINVD for the guest.
> > > 
> > > We could simply let userspace tell KVM how to handle WBINVD, but it's
> > > privileged for a reason.  Allowing an arbitrary user to enable
> > > physical WBINVD gives them a more access to the hardware.  Previously,
> > > this has only been enabled for guests supporting legacy PCI device
> > > assignment.  In such cases it's necessary for proper guest execution.
> > > We therefore create a new KVM-VFIO virtual device.  The user can add
> > > and remove VFIO groups to this device via file descriptors.  KVM
> > > makes use of the VFIO external user interface to validate that the
> > > user has access to physical hardware and gets the coherency state of
> > > the IOMMU from VFIO.  This provides equivalent functionality to
> > > legacy KVM assignment, while keeping (nearly) all the bits isolated.
> > > 
> > Looks good overall to me, one things though: to use legacy device
> > assignment one needs root permission, so only root user can enable
> > WBINVD emulation.
> 
> That's not entirely accurate, legacy device assignment can be used by a
> non-root user, libvirt does this all the time.  The part that requires
> root access is opening the pci-sysfs config file, the rest can be
> managed via file permissions on the remaining sysfs files.
> 
So how libvirt manages to do that as non-root user if pci-sysfs config
file needs root permission. I didn't mean to say that legacy code
checks for root explicitly, what I meant is that at some point root
permission is needed.

> >  Who does this permission checking here? Is only root
> > allowed to create non coherent group with vfio?
> 
> With vfio the user is granted permission by giving them access to the
> vfio group file (/dev/vfio/$GROUP) and binding all the devices in the
> group to vfio.  That enables the user to create a container (~iommu
> domain) with the group attached to it.  Only then will the vfio external
> user interface provide a reference to the group and enable this wbinvd
> support.  So, wbinvd emulation should only be available to a user that
> "own" a vfio group and has it configured for use with this interface.
What is the default permission of /dev/vfio/$GROUP?

--
			Gleb.
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