netdev - Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Device Passthrough Considered Harmful?

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Message-ID: <20240722132754.GA3371438@nvidia.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2024 10:27:54 -0300
From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...dia.com>
To: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@...asonboard.com>
Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>, ksummit@...ts.linux.dev,
	linux-cxl@...r.kernel.org, linux-rdma@...r.kernel.org,
	netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Device Passthrough Considered Harmful?

On Sun, Jul 21, 2024 at 09:51:05PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:

> That may be the case in the server world, and for protocols such as
> NVMe. My experience in the media world differs. I've seen too many
> horrors to list them all here, so I'll only mention one of the worst
> examples coming to my mind, of an (BSP) driver taking a physical address
> from unpriviledged userspace and giving it to a DMA engine without any
> filtering. I think this was mostly to be blamed on the developer not
> knowing better, there was no malicious intent.
> 
> In general, can we trust closed-source firmwares when they document the
> side effects of pass-through commands ? Again, I think the answer
> differs between different classes of devices, the security culture is
> not uniform across the whole IT industry.

That does make sense to me, and I certainly don't feel the same
comfort when looking at embedded or consumer HW that has a
historically much weaker security story.

Jason