[RFC 0/4] Virtio uses DMA API for all devices

Anshuman Khandual
Fri, 27 Jul 2018 10:58:33 -0000

On 07/27/2018 03:28 PM, Will Deacon wrote:
> Hi Anshuman,
>
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 09:29:37AM +0530, Anshuman Khandual wrote:
>> This patch series is the follow up on the discussions we had before
about
>> the RFC titled [RFC,V2] virtio: Add platform specific DMA API
translation
>> for virito devices (https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10417371/).
There
>> were suggestions about doing away with two different paths of
transactions
>> with the host/QEMU, first being the direct GPA and the other being the
DMA
>> API based translations.
>>
>> First patch attempts to create a direct GPA mapping based DMA
operations
>> structure called 'virtio_direct_dma_ops' with exact same
implementation
>> of the direct GPA path which virtio core currently has but just wrapped
in
>> a DMA API format. Virtio core must use 'virtio_direct_dma_ops'
instead of
>> the arch default in absence of VIRTIO_F_IOMMU_PLATFORM flag to preserve
the
>> existing semantics. The second patch does exactly that inside the
function
>> virtio_finalize_features(). The third patch removes the default direct
GPA
>> path from virtio core forcing it to use DMA API callbacks for all
devices.
>> Now with that change, every device must have a DMA operations structure
>> associated with it. The fourth patch adds an additional hook which
gives
>> the platform an opportunity to do yet another override if required.
This
>> platform hook can be used on POWER Ultravisor based protected guests to
>> load up SWIOTLB DMA callbacks to do the required (as discussed
previously
>> in the above mentioned thread how host is allowed to access only parts
of
>> the guest GPA range) bounce buffering into the shared memory for all
I/O
>> scatter gather buffers to be consumed on the host side.
>>
>> Please go through these patches and review whether this approach
broadly
>> makes sense. I will appreciate suggestions, inputs, comments regarding
>> the patches or the approach in general. Thank you.
> I just wanted to say that this patch series provides a means for us to
> force the coherent DMA ops for legacy virtio devices on arm64, which in
turn
> means that we can enable the SMMU with legacy devices in our fastmodel
> emulation platform (which is slowly being upgraded to virtio 1.0) without
> hanging during boot. Patch below.
>
> So:
>
> Acked-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com>
> Tested-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com>

Thanks Will.