Re: [PATCH 0/7] add non-strict mode support for arm-smmu-v3

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Thu May 31 2018 - 10:25:30 EST


On 31/05/18 14:49, Hanjun Guo wrote:
Hi Robin,

On 2018/5/31 19:24, Robin Murphy wrote:
On 31/05/18 08:42, Zhen Lei wrote:
In common, a IOMMU unmap operation follow the below steps:
1. remove the mapping in page table of the specified iova range
2. execute tlbi command to invalid the mapping which is cached in TLB
3. wait for the above tlbi operation to be finished
4. free the IOVA resource
5. free the physical memory resource

This maybe a problem when unmap is very frequently, the combination of tlbi
and wait operation will consume a lot of time. A feasible method is put off
tlbi and iova-free operation, when accumulating to a certain number or
reaching a specified time, execute only one tlbi_all command to clean up
TLB, then free the backup IOVAs. Mark as non-strict mode.

But it must be noted that, although the mapping has already been removed in
the page table, it maybe still exist in TLB. And the freed physical memory
may also be reused for others. So a attacker can persistent access to memory
based on the just freed IOVA, to obtain sensible data or corrupt memory. So
the VFIO should always choose the strict mode.

Some may consider put off physical memory free also, that will still follow
strict mode. But for the map_sg cases, the memory allocation is not controlled
by IOMMU APIs, so it is not enforceable.

Fortunately, Intel and AMD have already applied the non-strict mode, and put
queue_iova() operation into the common file dma-iommu.c., and my work is based
on it. The difference is that arm-smmu-v3 driver will call IOMMU common APIs to
unmap, but Intel and AMD IOMMU drivers are not.

Below is the performance data of strict vs non-strict for NVMe device:
Randomly Read IOPS: 146K(strict) vs 573K(non-strict)
Randomly Write IOPS: 143K(strict) vs 513K(non-strict)

What hardware is this on? If it's SMMUv3 without MSIs (e.g. D05), then you'll still be using the rubbish globally-blocking sync implementation. If that is the case, I'd be very interested to see how much there is to gain from just improving that - I've had a patch kicking around for a while[1] (also on a rebased branch at [2]), but don't have the means for serious performance testing.

The hardware is the new D06 which the SMMU with MSIs,

Cool! Now that profiling is fairly useful since we got rid of most of the locks, are you able to get an idea of how the overhead in the normal case is distributed between arm_smmu_cmdq_insert_cmd() and __arm_smmu_sync_poll_msi()? We're always trying to improve our understanding of where command-queue-related overheads turn out to be in practice, and there's still potentially room to do nicer things than TLBI_NH_ALL ;)

Robin.

it's not D05 :)

Thanks
Hanjun