Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] KVM: arm64: allow the VM to select DEVICE_* and NORMAL_NC for IO memory

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 12:21:50PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 08:51:42AM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 12:07:42PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > Talking to Will earlier, I think we can deem the PCIe scenario
> > > (somewhat) safe but not as a generic mechanism for other non-PCIe
> > > devices (e.g. platform). With this concern, can we make this Stage 2
> > > relaxation in KVM only for vfio-pci mappings? I don't have an example of
> > > non-PCIe device assignment to figure out how this should work though.
> > 
> > It is not a KVM problem. As I implied above it is VFIO's
> > responsibility to reliably reset the device, not KVMs. If for some
> > reason VFIO cannot do that on some SOC then VFIO devices should not
> > exist.
> > 
> > It is not KVM's job to double guess VFIO's own security properties.
> 
> I'd argue that since KVM is the one relaxing the memory attributes
> beyond what the VFIO driver allows the VMM to use, it is KVM's job to
> consider the security implications. This is fine for vfio-pci and
> Normal_NC but I'm not sure we can generalise.

I can see that, but I belive we should take this responsibility into
VFIO as a requirement. As I said in the other email we do want to
extend VFIO to support NormalNC VMAs for DPDK, so we need to take this
anyhow.

> > Specifically about platform the generic VFIO platform driver is the
> > ACPI based one. If the FW provides an ACPI method for device reset
> > that is not properly serializing, that is a FW bug. We can quirk it in
> > VFIO and block using those devices if they actually exist.
> > 
> > I expect the non-generic VFIO platform drivers to take care of this
> > issue internally with, barriers, read from devices, whatver is
> > required to make their SOCs order properly. Just as I would expect a
> > normal Linux platform driver to directly manage whatever
> > implementation specific ordering quirks the SOC may have.
> 
> This would be a new requirement if an existing VFIO platform driver
> relied on all mappings being Device. But maybe that's just theoretical
> at the moment, are there any concrete examples outside vfio-pci? If not,
> we can document it as per Lorenzo's suggestion to summarise this
> discussion under Documentation/.

My point is if this becomes a real world concern we have a solid
answer on how to resolve it - fix the VFIO driver to have a stronger
barrier before reset.

I'm confident it is not a problem for PCI and IIRC the remaining ARM
platform drivers were made primarily for DPDK, not KVM.

So I agree with documenting and perhaps a comment someplace in VFIO is
also warranted.

Jason