[PATCH V2 RFC] fixup! virtio: convert to use DMA api

Michael S. Tsirkin
Wed, 27 Apr 2016 18:17:57 -0000

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 04:15:35PM +0100, David Woodhouse
wrote:
> On Wed, 2016-04-27 at 18:05 +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> >
> > I really don't get it.
> >
> > There's exactly one device that works now and needs the
work-around and
> > so that we need to support, and that is virtio. It happens to have
> > exactly the same issue on all platforms.
>
> False. We have other devices which are currently *not* translated by
> the emulated IOMMU and which aren't going to be in the short term
> either.
>
> We also have other devices (emulated hardware NICs) to which precisely
> the same "we don't need protection" arguments apply, and
which we
> *could* expose to the guest without an IOMMU translation if we really
> wanted to. It makes as much sense as exposing virtio without an IOMMU,
> going forward.

The reasons for virtio are mostly dealing legacy.
We don't need protection is a separate issue
that I'd rather drop for now.

> > Why would we want to work hard to build platform-specific
> > solutions to a problem that can be solved in 5 lines of
> > generic code?
>
> Because it's a dirty hack in the *wrong* place.

No one came up with a better one so far :(

> --
> dwmw2