Re: [PATCH v11 Kernel 6/6] vfio: Selective dirty page tracking if IOMMU backed device pins pages

[Kirti Wankhede]

On 12/18/2019 5:42 AM, Alex Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Dec 2019 22:40:51 +0530
> Kirti Wankhede <address@hidden> wrote:

<snip>

> This will fail when there are devices within the IOMMU group that are
> not represented as vfio_devices.  My original suggestion was:
>
> On Thu, 14 Nov 2019 14:06:25 -0700
> Alex Williamson <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I think it does so by pinning pages.  Is it acceptable that if the
> > vendor driver pins any pages, then from that point forward we consider
> > the IOMMU group dirty page scope to be limited to pinned pages?  There
> > are complications around non-singleton IOMMU groups, but I think we're
> > already leaning towards that being a non-worthwhile problem to solve.
> > So if we require that only singleton IOMMU groups can pin pages and we
>
> We could tag vfio_groups as singleton at vfio_add_group_dev() time with
> an iommu_group_for_each_dev() walk so that we can cache the value on
> the struct vfio_group. 

I don't think iommu_group_for_each_dev() is required. Checking 
group->device_list in vfio_add_group_dev() if there are more than one 
device should work, right?

        list_for_each_entry(vdev, &group->device_list, group_next) {
                if (group->is_singleton) {
                        group->is_singleton = false;
                        break;
                } else {
                        group->is_singleton = true;
                }
        }


> vfio_group_nb_add_dev() could update this if
> the IOMMU group composition changes. 

I don't see vfio_group_nb_add_dev() calls vfio_add_group_dev() (?)
If checking is_singleton is taken care in vfio_group_nb_add_dev(), which 
is the only place where vfio_group is allocated, that should work, I think.


> vfio_pin_pages() could return
> -EINVAL if (!group->is_singleton).
>
> > pass the IOMMU group as a parameter to
> > vfio_iommu_driver_ops.pin_pages(), then the type1 backend can set a
> > flag on its local vfio_group struct to indicate dirty page scope is
> > limited to pinned pages.
>
> ie. vfio_iommu_type1_unpin_pages() calls find_iommu_group() on each
> domain in domain_list and the external_domain using the struct
> iommu_group pointer provided by vfio-core.  We set a new attribute on
> the vfio_group to indicate that vfio_group has (at some point) pinned
> pages.
>
> >   We might want to keep a flag on the
> > vfio_iommu struct to indicate if all of the vfio_groups for each
> > vfio_domain in the vfio_iommu.domain_list dirty page scope limited to
> > pinned pages as an optimization to avoid walking lists too often.  Then
> > we could test if vfio_iommu.domain_list is not empty and this new flag
> > does not limit the dirty page scope, then everything within each
> > vfio_dma is considered dirty.
>
> So at the point where we change vfio_group.has_pinned_pages from false
> to true, or a group is added or removed, we walk all the groups in the
> vfio_iommu and if they all have has_pinned_pages set, we can set a
> vfio_iommu.pinned_page_dirty_scope flag to true.  If that flag is
> already true on page pinning, we can skip the lookup.
>
> I still like this approach better, it doesn't require a callback from
> type1 to vfio-core and it doesn't require a heavy weight walking for
> group devices and vfio data structures every time we fill a bitmap.
> Did you run into issues trying to implement this approach? 

Thanks for elaborative steps.
This works. Changing this last commit.

Thanks,
Kirti