On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 07:12:08PM +0000, Robin Murphy wrote: > Now, in theory, yes, the real issue at hand is not unique to virtio-blk nor > SEV - any driver whose device has a sufficiently large DMA segment size and > who manages to get sufficient physically-contiguous memory could > technically generate a scatterlist segment longer than SWIOTLB can handle. > However, in practice that basically never happens, not least because very > few drivers ever override the default 64K DMA segment limit. AFAICS nothing > in drivers/virtio is calling dma_set_max_seg_size() or otherwise assigning > any dma_parms to replace the defaults either, so the really interesting > question here is how are these apparently-out-of-spec 256K segments getting > generated at all? drivers/block/virtio_blk.c:virtblk_probe(): /* Host can optionally specify maximum segment size and number of * segments. */ err = virtio_cread_feature(vdev, VIRTIO_BLK_F_SIZE_MAX, struct virtio_blk_config, size_max, &v); if (!err) blk_queue_max_segment_size(q, v); else blk_queue_max_segment_size(q, -1U); So it really is virtio_blk that is special here. The host could set VIRTIO_BLK_F_SIZE_MAX to paper over the problem, but I really think we need a dma_max_segment_size API that is wired up through the dma_map_ops to sort this out for real.