On Thu, 10 Nov 2022 06:57:57 +0000 "Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@xxxxxxxxxx> > > Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2022 3:53 AM > > > > On Wed, Nov 09, 2022 at 10:18:09AM -0700, Alex Williamson wrote: > > > > > DPDK supports no-iommu mode. > > > > Er? Huh? How? I thought no-iommu was for applications that didn't do > > DMA? How is DPDK getting packets in/out without DMA? I guess it snoops > > in /proc/ or something to learn PFNs of mlock'd memory? <shudder> > > iirc dpdk started with UIO plus various tricks (root privilege, hugepage, etc.) > to lock and learn PFN's from pagemap. Then when migrating it to vfio the > no-iommu option was introduced to provide UIO compatibility. IIRC, we essentially introduced no-iommu mode vfio because DPDK started pushing for extending interrupt support in uio-pci-generic. The UIO driver is also only meant for devices that don't do DMA, but obviously DPDK didn't care about that. Rather than extend UIO, we offered this no-iommu mode in vfio since we already had more extensive MSI support, were better able to impose restrictions on access to the device, and using the same device access makes the transition to proper IOMMU backed configurations more seamless. Thanks, Alex
