Re: [PATCH 0/9] RFC: NVME VFIO mediated device

[Bart Van Assche]

On Tue, 2019-03-19 at 16:41 +-0200, Maxim Levitsky wrote:
+AD4 +ACo  All guest memory is mapped into the physical nvme device 
+AD4    but not 1:1 as vfio-pci would do this.
+AD4    This allows very efficient DMA.
+AD4    To support this, patch 2 adds ability for a mdev device to listen on 
+AD4    guest's memory map events. 
+AD4    Any such memory is immediately pinned and then DMA mapped.
+AD4    (Support for fabric drivers where this is not possible exits too,
+AD4     in which case the fabric driver will do its own DMA mapping)

Does this mean that all guest memory is pinned all the time? If so, are you
sure that's acceptable?

Additionally, what is the performance overhead of the IOMMU notifier added
by patch 8/9? How often was that notifier called per second in your tests
and how much time was spent per call in the notifier callbacks?

Thanks,

Bart.