Re: [PATCH RFC 1/1] iommu: set the default iommu-dma mode as non-strict

From: Hanjun Guo
Date: Tue Feb 26 2019 - 07:38:08 EST


Hi Jean,

On 2019/1/31 22:55, Jean-Philippe Brucker wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 31/01/2019 13:52, Zhen Lei wrote:
>> Currently, many peripherals are faster than before. For example, the top
>> speed of the older netcard is 10Gb/s, and now it's more than 25Gb/s. But
>> when iommu page-table mapping enabled, it's hard to reach the top speed
>> in strict mode, because of frequently map and unmap operations. In order
>> to keep abreast of the times, I think it's better to set non-strict as
>> default.
>
> Most users won't be aware of this relaxation and will have their system
> vulnerable to e.g. thunderbolt hotplug. See for example 4.3 Deferred
> Invalidation in
> http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr-get.cgi/2018/MSC/MSC-2018-21.pdf
>
> Why not keep the policy to secure by default, as we do for
> iommu.passthrough? And maybe add something similar to
> CONFIG_IOMMU_DEFAULT_PASSTRHOUGH? It's easy enough for experts to pass a
> command-line argument or change the default config.

Sorry for the late reply, it was Chinese new year, and we had a long discussion
internally, we are fine to add a Kconfig but not sure OS vendors will set it
to default y.

OS vendors seems not happy to pass a command-line argument, to be honest,
this is our motivation to enable non-strict as default. Hope OS vendors
can see this email thread, and give some input here.

Thanks
Hanjun