Device iotlb

Vhost-net Device IOTLB

Overview

This page provides information about the design of Device IOTLB for vhost-net to provides a secure and efficient environment for dpdk like program in guest.

Design Goals

• Architecture independent: The implementation should be compatible to current Qemu's IOMMU architecture, then it should be architecture independent and then be easy to be ported to various platform/IOMMU implementation.
• Efficient for dpdk like program: End user should have no obvious felling performance degradation when using dpdk like program in guest. The design was optimized for dpdk like programs which use fixed mappings in guest.
• Compatible: The implementation should be compatible to current vhost-net memory region API to support VM without DMAR enabled.

Design

• Vhost-net can query the address mappings from guest io virtual address to host virtual address through ioctl.
• The above translation result could be cached in a vhost device specific IOTLB for a while to speed up the future translation in the future.
• Qemu can invalidate one or more mappings that cached by vhost through ioctl.
• Qemu can start or stop the DMAR through ioctl.

Example

• The above figure shows the design of device IOTLB for vhost-net:
  • Startup:
    • When DMAR was enabled by guest IOMMU driver, qemu will notify vhost to start the device IOTLB. Device IOTLB will be started with no entries cached.
  • DMA emulation:
    • When vhost tries to emulate a DMA, it will first tries to translate the guest iova to hva through device IOTLB.
    • If vhost could not find a such translation, it will suspend itself and ask for the assistance of qemu to do the translation.
    • Qemu get notified and will query the IOMMU for the translation.
    • After the translation is finished, qemu will send the result to vhost.
    • Vhost will then restart the DMA.
  • TLB Invalidation:
    • Vhost will snoop the TLB invalidation emulated by qemu.
    • If a specific TLB invalidation is relate to the device whose DMA is emulated by vhost, vhost will be notified and the TLB entry cached by vhost will be cleared.