On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 09:55:59AM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote: > On Sun, 2013-09-29 at 17:44 +0300, Gleb Natapov wrote: > > On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 07:52:28AM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote: > > > On Sun, 2013-09-29 at 16:16 +0300, Gleb Natapov wrote: > > > > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 03:23:15PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote: > > > > > So far we've succeeded at making KVM and VFIO mostly unaware of each > > > > > other, but there's any important point where that breaks down. Intel > > > > > VT-d hardware may or may not support snoop control. When snoop > > > > > control is available, intel-iommu promotes No-Snoop transactions on > > > > > PCIe to be cache coherent. That allows KVM to handle things like the > > > > > x86 WBINVD opcode as a nop. When the hardware does not support this, > > > > > KVM must implement a hardware visible WBINVD for the guest. > > > > > > > > > > We could simply let userspace tell KVM how to handle WBINVD, but it's > > > > > privileged for a reason. Allowing an arbitrary user to enable > > > > > physical WBINVD gives them a more access to the hardware. Previously, > > > > > this has only been enabled for guests supporting legacy PCI device > > > > > assignment. In such cases it's necessary for proper guest execution. > > > > > We therefore create a new KVM-VFIO virtual device. The user can add > > > > > and remove VFIO groups to this device via file descriptors. KVM > > > > > makes use of the VFIO external user interface to validate that the > > > > > user has access to physical hardware and gets the coherency state of > > > > > the IOMMU from VFIO. This provides equivalent functionality to > > > > > legacy KVM assignment, while keeping (nearly) all the bits isolated. > > > > > > > > > Looks good overall to me, one things though: to use legacy device > > > > assignment one needs root permission, so only root user can enable > > > > WBINVD emulation. > > > > > > That's not entirely accurate, legacy device assignment can be used by a > > > non-root user, libvirt does this all the time. The part that requires > > > root access is opening the pci-sysfs config file, the rest can be > > > managed via file permissions on the remaining sysfs files. > > > > > So how libvirt manages to do that as non-root user if pci-sysfs config > > file needs root permission. I didn't mean to say that legacy code > > checks for root explicitly, what I meant is that at some point root > > permission is needed. > > Yes, libvirt needs admin permission for legacy to bind to pci-stub, > change permission on sysfs files and pass an opened pci config sysfs > file descriptor. For vfio libvirt needs admin permission to bind to > vfio-pci and change group file permission. From that perspective the > admin requirement is similar. > Yes, certainly appears so. Thanks. -- Gleb. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
