Date:   Tue, 27 Apr 2021 15:08:46 +1000
From:   David Gibson <david@...son.dropbear.id.au>
To:     Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...dia.com>
Cc:     Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@...hat.com>,
        "Liu, Yi L" <yi.l.liu@...el.com>,
        Jacob Pan <jacob.jun.pan@...ux.intel.com>,
        Auger Eric <eric.auger@...hat.com>,
        Jean-Philippe Brucker <jean-philippe@...aro.org>,
        "Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@...el.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Joerg Roedel <joro@...tes.org>,
        Lu Baolu <baolu.lu@...ux.intel.com>,
        David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>,
        "iommu@...ts.linux-foundation.org" <iommu@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
        "cgroups@...r.kernel.org" <cgroups@...r.kernel.org>,
        Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>, Li Zefan <lizefan@...wei.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Jean-Philippe Brucker <jean-philippe@...aro.com>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        "Raj, Ashok" <ashok.raj@...el.com>, "Wu, Hao" <hao.wu@...el.com>,
        "Jiang, Dave" <dave.jiang@...el.com>,
        Alexey Kardashevskiy <aik@...abs.ru>
Subject: Re: [PATCH V4 05/18] iommu/ioasid: Redefine IOASID set and
 allocation APIs

On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 08:39:50PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 04:38:08PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> 
> > Because it's fundamental to the isolation of the device?  What you're
> > proposing doesn't get around the group issue, it just makes it implicit
> > rather than explicit in the uapi.
> 
> I'm not even sure it makes it explicit or implicit, it just takes away
> the FD.
> 
> There are four group IOCTLs, I see them mapping to /dev/ioasid follows:
>  VFIO_GROUP_GET_STATUS - 
>    + VFIO_GROUP_FLAGS_CONTAINER_SET is fairly redundant
>    + VFIO_GROUP_FLAGS_VIABLE could be in a new sysfs under
>      kernel/iomm_groups, or could be an IOCTL on /dev/ioasid
>        IOASID_ALL_DEVICES_VIABLE
> 
>  VFIO_GROUP_SET_CONTAINER -
>    + This happens implicitly when the device joins the IOASID
>      so it gets moved to the vfio_device FD:
>       ioctl(vifo_device_fd, JOIN_IOASID_FD, ioasifd)
> 
>  VFIO_GROUP_UNSET_CONTAINER -
>    + Also moved to the vfio_device FD, opposite of JOIN_IOASID_FD
> 
>  VFIO_GROUP_GET_DEVICE_FD -
>    + Replaced by opening /dev/vfio/deviceX
>      Learn the deviceX which will be the cdev sysfs shows as:
>       /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0/vfio/deviceX/dev
>     Open /dev/vfio/deviceX
> 
> > > How do we model the VFIO group security concept to something like
> > > VDPA?
> > 
> > Is it really a "VFIO group security concept"?  We're reflecting the
> > reality of the hardware, not all devices are fully isolated.  
> 
> Well, exactly.
> 
> /dev/ioasid should understand the group concept somehow, otherwise it
> is incomplete and maybe even security broken.
> 
> So, how do I add groups to, say, VDPA in a way that makes sense? The
> only answer I come to is broadly what I outlined here - make
> /dev/ioasid do all the group operations, and do them when we enjoin
> the VDPA device to the ioasid.
> 
> Once I have solved all the groups problems with the non-VFIO users,
> then where does that leave VFIO? Why does VFIO need a group FD if
> everyone else doesn't?
> 
> > IOMMU group.  This is the reality that any userspace driver needs to
> > play in, it doesn't magically go away because we drop the group file
> > descriptor.  
> 
> I'm not saying it does, I'm saying it makes the uAPI more regular and
> easier to fit into /dev/ioasid without the group FD.
> 
> > It only makes the uapi more difficult to use correctly because
> > userspace drivers need to go outside of the uapi to have any idea
> > that this restriction exists.  
> 
> I don't think it makes any substantive difference one way or the
> other.
> 
> With the group FD: the userspace has to read sysfs, find the list of
> devices in the group, open the group fd, create device FDs for each
> device using the name from sysfs.
> 
> Starting from a BDF the general pseudo code is
>  group_path = readlink("/sys/bus/pci/devices/BDF/iommu_group")
>  group_name = basename(group_path)
>  group_fd = open("/dev/vfio/"+group_name)
>  device_fd = ioctl(VFIO_GROUP_GET_DEVICE_FD, BDF);
> 
> Without the group FD: the userspace has to read sysfs, find the list
> of devices in the group and then open the device-specific cdev (found
> via sysfs) and link them to a /dev/ioasid FD.
> 
> Starting from a BDF the general pseudo code is:
>  device_name = first_directory_of("/sys/bus/pci/devices/BDF/vfio/")
>  device_fd = open("/dev/vfio/"+device_name)
>  ioasidfd = open("/dev/ioasid")
>  ioctl(device_fd, JOIN_IOASID_FD, ioasidfd)

This line is the problem.

[Historical aside: Alex's early drafts for the VFIO interface looked
quite similar to this.  Ben Herrenschmidt and myself persuaded him it
was a bad idea, and groups were developed instead.  I still think it's
a bad idea, and not just for POWER]

As Alex says, if this line fails because of the group restrictions,
that's not great because it's not very obvious what's gone wrong.  But
IMO, the success path on a multi-device group is kind of worse:
you've now made made a meaningful and visible change to the setup of
devices which are not mentioned in this line *at all*.  If you've
changed the DMA address space of this device you've also changed it
for everything else in the group - there's no getting around that.

For both those reasons, I absolutely agree with Alex that retaining
the explicit group model is valuable.

Yes, it makes set up more of a pain, but it's necessary complexity to
actually understand what's going on here.


> These two routes can have identical outcomes and identical security
> checks.
> 
> In both cases if userspace wants a list of BDFs in the same group as
> the BDF it is interested in:
>    readdir("/sys/bus/pci/devices/BDF/iommu_group/devices")
> 
> It seems like a very small difference to me.
> 
> I still don't see how the group restriction gets surfaced to the
> application through the group FD. The applications I looked through
> just treat the group FD as a step on their way to get the device_fd.
> 
> Jason
> 

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson

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