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Documentation / vfio.txt


Based on kernel version 4.16.1. Page generated on 2018-04-09 11:53 EST.

1	==================================
2	VFIO - "Virtual Function I/O" [1]_
3	==================================
4	
5	Many modern system now provide DMA and interrupt remapping facilities
6	to help ensure I/O devices behave within the boundaries they've been
7	allotted.  This includes x86 hardware with AMD-Vi and Intel VT-d,
8	POWER systems with Partitionable Endpoints (PEs) and embedded PowerPC
9	systems such as Freescale PAMU.  The VFIO driver is an IOMMU/device
10	agnostic framework for exposing direct device access to userspace, in
11	a secure, IOMMU protected environment.  In other words, this allows
12	safe [2]_, non-privileged, userspace drivers.
13	
14	Why do we want that?  Virtual machines often make use of direct device
15	access ("device assignment") when configured for the highest possible
16	I/O performance.  From a device and host perspective, this simply
17	turns the VM into a userspace driver, with the benefits of
18	significantly reduced latency, higher bandwidth, and direct use of
19	bare-metal device drivers [3]_.
20	
21	Some applications, particularly in the high performance computing
22	field, also benefit from low-overhead, direct device access from
23	userspace.  Examples include network adapters (often non-TCP/IP based)
24	and compute accelerators.  Prior to VFIO, these drivers had to either
25	go through the full development cycle to become proper upstream
26	driver, be maintained out of tree, or make use of the UIO framework,
27	which has no notion of IOMMU protection, limited interrupt support,
28	and requires root privileges to access things like PCI configuration
29	space.
30	
31	The VFIO driver framework intends to unify these, replacing both the
32	KVM PCI specific device assignment code as well as provide a more
33	secure, more featureful userspace driver environment than UIO.
34	
35	Groups, Devices, and IOMMUs
36	---------------------------
37	
38	Devices are the main target of any I/O driver.  Devices typically
39	create a programming interface made up of I/O access, interrupts,
40	and DMA.  Without going into the details of each of these, DMA is
41	by far the most critical aspect for maintaining a secure environment
42	as allowing a device read-write access to system memory imposes the
43	greatest risk to the overall system integrity.
44	
45	To help mitigate this risk, many modern IOMMUs now incorporate
46	isolation properties into what was, in many cases, an interface only
47	meant for translation (ie. solving the addressing problems of devices
48	with limited address spaces).  With this, devices can now be isolated
49	from each other and from arbitrary memory access, thus allowing
50	things like secure direct assignment of devices into virtual machines.
51	
52	This isolation is not always at the granularity of a single device
53	though.  Even when an IOMMU is capable of this, properties of devices,
54	interconnects, and IOMMU topologies can each reduce this isolation.
55	For instance, an individual device may be part of a larger multi-
56	function enclosure.  While the IOMMU may be able to distinguish
57	between devices within the enclosure, the enclosure may not require
58	transactions between devices to reach the IOMMU.  Examples of this
59	could be anything from a multi-function PCI device with backdoors
60	between functions to a non-PCI-ACS (Access Control Services) capable
61	bridge allowing redirection without reaching the IOMMU.  Topology
62	can also play a factor in terms of hiding devices.  A PCIe-to-PCI
63	bridge masks the devices behind it, making transaction appear as if
64	from the bridge itself.  Obviously IOMMU design plays a major factor
65	as well.
66	
67	Therefore, while for the most part an IOMMU may have device level
68	granularity, any system is susceptible to reduced granularity.  The
69	IOMMU API therefore supports a notion of IOMMU groups.  A group is
70	a set of devices which is isolatable from all other devices in the
71	system.  Groups are therefore the unit of ownership used by VFIO.
72	
73	While the group is the minimum granularity that must be used to
74	ensure secure user access, it's not necessarily the preferred
75	granularity.  In IOMMUs which make use of page tables, it may be
76	possible to share a set of page tables between different groups,
77	reducing the overhead both to the platform (reduced TLB thrashing,
78	reduced duplicate page tables), and to the user (programming only
79	a single set of translations).  For this reason, VFIO makes use of
80	a container class, which may hold one or more groups.  A container
81	is created by simply opening the /dev/vfio/vfio character device.
82	
83	On its own, the container provides little functionality, with all
84	but a couple version and extension query interfaces locked away.
85	The user needs to add a group into the container for the next level
86	of functionality.  To do this, the user first needs to identify the
87	group associated with the desired device.  This can be done using
88	the sysfs links described in the example below.  By unbinding the
89	device from the host driver and binding it to a VFIO driver, a new
90	VFIO group will appear for the group as /dev/vfio/$GROUP, where
91	$GROUP is the IOMMU group number of which the device is a member.
92	If the IOMMU group contains multiple devices, each will need to
93	be bound to a VFIO driver before operations on the VFIO group
94	are allowed (it's also sufficient to only unbind the device from
95	host drivers if a VFIO driver is unavailable; this will make the
96	group available, but not that particular device).  TBD - interface
97	for disabling driver probing/locking a device.
98	
99	Once the group is ready, it may be added to the container by opening
100	the VFIO group character device (/dev/vfio/$GROUP) and using the
101	VFIO_GROUP_SET_CONTAINER ioctl, passing the file descriptor of the
102	previously opened container file.  If desired and if the IOMMU driver
103	supports sharing the IOMMU context between groups, multiple groups may
104	be set to the same container.  If a group fails to set to a container
105	with existing groups, a new empty container will need to be used
106	instead.
107	
108	With a group (or groups) attached to a container, the remaining
109	ioctls become available, enabling access to the VFIO IOMMU interfaces.
110	Additionally, it now becomes possible to get file descriptors for each
111	device within a group using an ioctl on the VFIO group file descriptor.
112	
113	The VFIO device API includes ioctls for describing the device, the I/O
114	regions and their read/write/mmap offsets on the device descriptor, as
115	well as mechanisms for describing and registering interrupt
116	notifications.
117	
118	VFIO Usage Example
119	------------------
120	
121	Assume user wants to access PCI device 0000:06:0d.0::
122	
123		$ readlink /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:06:0d.0/iommu_group
124		../../../../kernel/iommu_groups/26
125	
126	This device is therefore in IOMMU group 26.  This device is on the
127	pci bus, therefore the user will make use of vfio-pci to manage the
128	group::
129	
130		# modprobe vfio-pci
131	
132	Binding this device to the vfio-pci driver creates the VFIO group
133	character devices for this group::
134	
135		$ lspci -n -s 0000:06:0d.0
136		06:0d.0 0401: 1102:0002 (rev 08)
137		# echo 0000:06:0d.0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:06:0d.0/driver/unbind
138		# echo 1102 0002 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id
139	
140	Now we need to look at what other devices are in the group to free
141	it for use by VFIO::
142	
143		$ ls -l /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:06:0d.0/iommu_group/devices
144		total 0
145		lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Apr 23 16:13 0000:00:1e.0 ->
146			../../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1e.0
147		lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Apr 23 16:13 0000:06:0d.0 ->
148			../../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1e.0/0000:06:0d.0
149		lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Apr 23 16:13 0000:06:0d.1 ->
150			../../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1e.0/0000:06:0d.1
151	
152	This device is behind a PCIe-to-PCI bridge [4]_, therefore we also
153	need to add device 0000:06:0d.1 to the group following the same
154	procedure as above.  Device 0000:00:1e.0 is a bridge that does
155	not currently have a host driver, therefore it's not required to
156	bind this device to the vfio-pci driver (vfio-pci does not currently
157	support PCI bridges).
158	
159	The final step is to provide the user with access to the group if
160	unprivileged operation is desired (note that /dev/vfio/vfio provides
161	no capabilities on its own and is therefore expected to be set to
162	mode 0666 by the system)::
163	
164		# chown user:user /dev/vfio/26
165	
166	The user now has full access to all the devices and the iommu for this
167	group and can access them as follows::
168	
169		int container, group, device, i;
170		struct vfio_group_status group_status =
171						{ .argsz = sizeof(group_status) };
172		struct vfio_iommu_type1_info iommu_info = { .argsz = sizeof(iommu_info) };
173		struct vfio_iommu_type1_dma_map dma_map = { .argsz = sizeof(dma_map) };
174		struct vfio_device_info device_info = { .argsz = sizeof(device_info) };
175	
176		/* Create a new container */
177		container = open("/dev/vfio/vfio", O_RDWR);
178	
179		if (ioctl(container, VFIO_GET_API_VERSION) != VFIO_API_VERSION)
180			/* Unknown API version */
181	
182		if (!ioctl(container, VFIO_CHECK_EXTENSION, VFIO_TYPE1_IOMMU))
183			/* Doesn't support the IOMMU driver we want. */
184	
185		/* Open the group */
186		group = open("/dev/vfio/26", O_RDWR);
187	
188		/* Test the group is viable and available */
189		ioctl(group, VFIO_GROUP_GET_STATUS, &group_status);
190	
191		if (!(group_status.flags & VFIO_GROUP_FLAGS_VIABLE))
192			/* Group is not viable (ie, not all devices bound for vfio) */
193	
194		/* Add the group to the container */
195		ioctl(group, VFIO_GROUP_SET_CONTAINER, &container);
196	
197		/* Enable the IOMMU model we want */
198		ioctl(container, VFIO_SET_IOMMU, VFIO_TYPE1_IOMMU);
199	
200		/* Get addition IOMMU info */
201		ioctl(container, VFIO_IOMMU_GET_INFO, &iommu_info);
202	
203		/* Allocate some space and setup a DMA mapping */
204		dma_map.vaddr = mmap(0, 1024 * 1024, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
205				     MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS, 0, 0);
206		dma_map.size = 1024 * 1024;
207		dma_map.iova = 0; /* 1MB starting at 0x0 from device view */
208		dma_map.flags = VFIO_DMA_MAP_FLAG_READ | VFIO_DMA_MAP_FLAG_WRITE;
209	
210		ioctl(container, VFIO_IOMMU_MAP_DMA, &dma_map);
211	
212		/* Get a file descriptor for the device */
213		device = ioctl(group, VFIO_GROUP_GET_DEVICE_FD, "0000:06:0d.0");
214	
215		/* Test and setup the device */
216		ioctl(device, VFIO_DEVICE_GET_INFO, &device_info);
217	
218		for (i = 0; i < device_info.num_regions; i++) {
219			struct vfio_region_info reg = { .argsz = sizeof(reg) };
220	
221			reg.index = i;
222	
223			ioctl(device, VFIO_DEVICE_GET_REGION_INFO, &reg);
224	
225			/* Setup mappings... read/write offsets, mmaps
226			 * For PCI devices, config space is a region */
227		}
228	
229		for (i = 0; i < device_info.num_irqs; i++) {
230			struct vfio_irq_info irq = { .argsz = sizeof(irq) };
231	
232			irq.index = i;
233	
234			ioctl(device, VFIO_DEVICE_GET_IRQ_INFO, &irq);
235	
236			/* Setup IRQs... eventfds, VFIO_DEVICE_SET_IRQS */
237		}
238	
239		/* Gratuitous device reset and go... */
240		ioctl(device, VFIO_DEVICE_RESET);
241	
242	VFIO User API
243	-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
244	
245	Please see include/linux/vfio.h for complete API documentation.
246	
247	VFIO bus driver API
248	-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
249	
250	VFIO bus drivers, such as vfio-pci make use of only a few interfaces
251	into VFIO core.  When devices are bound and unbound to the driver,
252	the driver should call vfio_add_group_dev() and vfio_del_group_dev()
253	respectively::
254	
255		extern int vfio_add_group_dev(struct iommu_group *iommu_group,
256		                              struct device *dev,
257					      const struct vfio_device_ops *ops,
258					      void *device_data);
259	
260		extern void *vfio_del_group_dev(struct device *dev);
261	
262	vfio_add_group_dev() indicates to the core to begin tracking the
263	specified iommu_group and register the specified dev as owned by
264	a VFIO bus driver.  The driver provides an ops structure for callbacks
265	similar to a file operations structure::
266	
267		struct vfio_device_ops {
268			int	(*open)(void *device_data);
269			void	(*release)(void *device_data);
270			ssize_t	(*read)(void *device_data, char __user *buf,
271					size_t count, loff_t *ppos);
272			ssize_t	(*write)(void *device_data, const char __user *buf,
273					 size_t size, loff_t *ppos);
274			long	(*ioctl)(void *device_data, unsigned int cmd,
275					 unsigned long arg);
276			int	(*mmap)(void *device_data, struct vm_area_struct *vma);
277		};
278	
279	Each function is passed the device_data that was originally registered
280	in the vfio_add_group_dev() call above.  This allows the bus driver
281	an easy place to store its opaque, private data.  The open/release
282	callbacks are issued when a new file descriptor is created for a
283	device (via VFIO_GROUP_GET_DEVICE_FD).  The ioctl interface provides
284	a direct pass through for VFIO_DEVICE_* ioctls.  The read/write/mmap
285	interfaces implement the device region access defined by the device's
286	own VFIO_DEVICE_GET_REGION_INFO ioctl.
287	
288	
289	PPC64 sPAPR implementation note
290	-------------------------------
291	
292	This implementation has some specifics:
293	
294	1) On older systems (POWER7 with P5IOC2/IODA1) only one IOMMU group per
295	   container is supported as an IOMMU table is allocated at the boot time,
296	   one table per a IOMMU group which is a Partitionable Endpoint (PE)
297	   (PE is often a PCI domain but not always).
298	
299	   Newer systems (POWER8 with IODA2) have improved hardware design which allows
300	   to remove this limitation and have multiple IOMMU groups per a VFIO
301	   container.
302	
303	2) The hardware supports so called DMA windows - the PCI address range
304	   within which DMA transfer is allowed, any attempt to access address space
305	   out of the window leads to the whole PE isolation.
306	
307	3) PPC64 guests are paravirtualized but not fully emulated. There is an API
308	   to map/unmap pages for DMA, and it normally maps 1..32 pages per call and
309	   currently there is no way to reduce the number of calls. In order to make
310	   things faster, the map/unmap handling has been implemented in real mode
311	   which provides an excellent performance which has limitations such as
312	   inability to do locked pages accounting in real time.
313	
314	4) According to sPAPR specification, A Partitionable Endpoint (PE) is an I/O
315	   subtree that can be treated as a unit for the purposes of partitioning and
316	   error recovery. A PE may be a single or multi-function IOA (IO Adapter), a
317	   function of a multi-function IOA, or multiple IOAs (possibly including
318	   switch and bridge structures above the multiple IOAs). PPC64 guests detect
319	   PCI errors and recover from them via EEH RTAS services, which works on the
320	   basis of additional ioctl commands.
321	
322	   So 4 additional ioctls have been added:
323	
324		VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_TCE_GET_INFO
325			returns the size and the start of the DMA window on the PCI bus.
326	
327		VFIO_IOMMU_ENABLE
328			enables the container. The locked pages accounting
329			is done at this point. This lets user first to know what
330			the DMA window is and adjust rlimit before doing any real job.
331	
332		VFIO_IOMMU_DISABLE
333			disables the container.
334	
335		VFIO_EEH_PE_OP
336			provides an API for EEH setup, error detection and recovery.
337	
338	   The code flow from the example above should be slightly changed::
339	
340		struct vfio_eeh_pe_op pe_op = { .argsz = sizeof(pe_op), .flags = 0 };
341	
342		.....
343		/* Add the group to the container */
344		ioctl(group, VFIO_GROUP_SET_CONTAINER, &container);
345	
346		/* Enable the IOMMU model we want */
347		ioctl(container, VFIO_SET_IOMMU, VFIO_SPAPR_TCE_IOMMU)
348	
349		/* Get addition sPAPR IOMMU info */
350		vfio_iommu_spapr_tce_info spapr_iommu_info;
351		ioctl(container, VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_TCE_GET_INFO, &spapr_iommu_info);
352	
353		if (ioctl(container, VFIO_IOMMU_ENABLE))
354			/* Cannot enable container, may be low rlimit */
355	
356		/* Allocate some space and setup a DMA mapping */
357		dma_map.vaddr = mmap(0, 1024 * 1024, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
358				     MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS, 0, 0);
359	
360		dma_map.size = 1024 * 1024;
361		dma_map.iova = 0; /* 1MB starting at 0x0 from device view */
362		dma_map.flags = VFIO_DMA_MAP_FLAG_READ | VFIO_DMA_MAP_FLAG_WRITE;
363	
364		/* Check here is .iova/.size are within DMA window from spapr_iommu_info */
365		ioctl(container, VFIO_IOMMU_MAP_DMA, &dma_map);
366	
367		/* Get a file descriptor for the device */
368		device = ioctl(group, VFIO_GROUP_GET_DEVICE_FD, "0000:06:0d.0");
369	
370		....
371	
372		/* Gratuitous device reset and go... */
373		ioctl(device, VFIO_DEVICE_RESET);
374	
375		/* Make sure EEH is supported */
376		ioctl(container, VFIO_CHECK_EXTENSION, VFIO_EEH);
377	
378		/* Enable the EEH functionality on the device */
379		pe_op.op = VFIO_EEH_PE_ENABLE;
380		ioctl(container, VFIO_EEH_PE_OP, &pe_op);
381	
382		/* You're suggested to create additional data struct to represent
383		 * PE, and put child devices belonging to same IOMMU group to the
384		 * PE instance for later reference.
385		 */
386	
387		/* Check the PE's state and make sure it's in functional state */
388		pe_op.op = VFIO_EEH_PE_GET_STATE;
389		ioctl(container, VFIO_EEH_PE_OP, &pe_op);
390	
391		/* Save device state using pci_save_state().
392		 * EEH should be enabled on the specified device.
393		 */
394	
395		....
396	
397		/* Inject EEH error, which is expected to be caused by 32-bits
398		 * config load.
399		 */
400		pe_op.op = VFIO_EEH_PE_INJECT_ERR;
401		pe_op.err.type = EEH_ERR_TYPE_32;
402		pe_op.err.func = EEH_ERR_FUNC_LD_CFG_ADDR;
403		pe_op.err.addr = 0ul;
404		pe_op.err.mask = 0ul;
405		ioctl(container, VFIO_EEH_PE_OP, &pe_op);
406	
407		....
408	
409		/* When 0xFF's returned from reading PCI config space or IO BARs
410		 * of the PCI device. Check the PE's state to see if that has been
411		 * frozen.
412		 */
413		ioctl(container, VFIO_EEH_PE_OP, &pe_op);
414	
415		/* Waiting for pending PCI transactions to be completed and don't
416		 * produce any more PCI traffic from/to the affected PE until
417		 * recovery is finished.
418		 */
419	
420		/* Enable IO for the affected PE and collect logs. Usually, the
421		 * standard part of PCI config space, AER registers are dumped
422		 * as logs for further analysis.
423		 */
424		pe_op.op = VFIO_EEH_PE_UNFREEZE_IO;
425		ioctl(container, VFIO_EEH_PE_OP, &pe_op);
426	
427		/*
428		 * Issue PE reset: hot or fundamental reset. Usually, hot reset
429		 * is enough. However, the firmware of some PCI adapters would
430		 * require fundamental reset.
431		 */
432		pe_op.op = VFIO_EEH_PE_RESET_HOT;
433		ioctl(container, VFIO_EEH_PE_OP, &pe_op);
434		pe_op.op = VFIO_EEH_PE_RESET_DEACTIVATE;
435		ioctl(container, VFIO_EEH_PE_OP, &pe_op);
436	
437		/* Configure the PCI bridges for the affected PE */
438		pe_op.op = VFIO_EEH_PE_CONFIGURE;
439		ioctl(container, VFIO_EEH_PE_OP, &pe_op);
440	
441		/* Restored state we saved at initialization time. pci_restore_state()
442		 * is good enough as an example.
443		 */
444	
445		/* Hopefully, error is recovered successfully. Now, you can resume to
446		 * start PCI traffic to/from the affected PE.
447		 */
448	
449		....
450	
451	5) There is v2 of SPAPR TCE IOMMU. It deprecates VFIO_IOMMU_ENABLE/
452	   VFIO_IOMMU_DISABLE and implements 2 new ioctls:
453	   VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_REGISTER_MEMORY and VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_UNREGISTER_MEMORY
454	   (which are unsupported in v1 IOMMU).
455	
456	   PPC64 paravirtualized guests generate a lot of map/unmap requests,
457	   and the handling of those includes pinning/unpinning pages and updating
458	   mm::locked_vm counter to make sure we do not exceed the rlimit.
459	   The v2 IOMMU splits accounting and pinning into separate operations:
460	
461	   - VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_REGISTER_MEMORY/VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_UNREGISTER_MEMORY ioctls
462	     receive a user space address and size of the block to be pinned.
463	     Bisecting is not supported and VFIO_IOMMU_UNREGISTER_MEMORY is expected to
464	     be called with the exact address and size used for registering
465	     the memory block. The userspace is not expected to call these often.
466	     The ranges are stored in a linked list in a VFIO container.
467	
468	   - VFIO_IOMMU_MAP_DMA/VFIO_IOMMU_UNMAP_DMA ioctls only update the actual
469	     IOMMU table and do not do pinning; instead these check that the userspace
470	     address is from pre-registered range.
471	
472	   This separation helps in optimizing DMA for guests.
473	
474	6) sPAPR specification allows guests to have an additional DMA window(s) on
475	   a PCI bus with a variable page size. Two ioctls have been added to support
476	   this: VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_TCE_CREATE and VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_TCE_REMOVE.
477	   The platform has to support the functionality or error will be returned to
478	   the userspace. The existing hardware supports up to 2 DMA windows, one is
479	   2GB long, uses 4K pages and called "default 32bit window"; the other can
480	   be as big as entire RAM, use different page size, it is optional - guests
481	   create those in run-time if the guest driver supports 64bit DMA.
482	
483	   VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_TCE_CREATE receives a page shift, a DMA window size and
484	   a number of TCE table levels (if a TCE table is going to be big enough and
485	   the kernel may not be able to allocate enough of physically contiguous
486	   memory). It creates a new window in the available slot and returns the bus
487	   address where the new window starts. Due to hardware limitation, the user
488	   space cannot choose the location of DMA windows.
489	
490	   VFIO_IOMMU_SPAPR_TCE_REMOVE receives the bus start address of the window
491	   and removes it.
492	
493	-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
494	
495	.. [1] VFIO was originally an acronym for "Virtual Function I/O" in its
496	   initial implementation by Tom Lyon while as Cisco.  We've since
497	   outgrown the acronym, but it's catchy.
498	
499	.. [2] "safe" also depends upon a device being "well behaved".  It's
500	   possible for multi-function devices to have backdoors between
501	   functions and even for single function devices to have alternative
502	   access to things like PCI config space through MMIO registers.  To
503	   guard against the former we can include additional precautions in the
504	   IOMMU driver to group multi-function PCI devices together
505	   (iommu=group_mf).  The latter we can't prevent, but the IOMMU should
506	   still provide isolation.  For PCI, SR-IOV Virtual Functions are the
507	   best indicator of "well behaved", as these are designed for
508	   virtualization usage models.
509	
510	.. [3] As always there are trade-offs to virtual machine device
511	   assignment that are beyond the scope of VFIO.  It's expected that
512	   future IOMMU technologies will reduce some, but maybe not all, of
513	   these trade-offs.
514	
515	.. [4] In this case the device is below a PCI bridge, so transactions
516	   from either function of the device are indistinguishable to the iommu::
517	
518		-[0000:00]-+-1e.0-[06]--+-0d.0
519					\-0d.1
520	
521		00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 90)
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