Re: [Xen-devel] RE: IOMMU faults

[Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:21 -0700 on 16 Jun (1308226873), Kay, Allen M wrote:
> > - The Intel IOMMU fault handler prints quite a lot of info in interrupt
> >   context, making it easier to livelock.  Still I think the general
> >   problem applies on AMD too.
> 
> Someone at Intel looked into implementing measured rate printing in vt-d 
> fault handler.  He encountered some complications.  I remember it had to do 
> with measured rate printing not enabled by default (?).  For now, I think 
> having it print out only for debug case sounds simple enough.  I will submit 
> a patch for it.
> 

That's great, thanks. 

> > - Domain destruction re-assigns passed though cards to dom0, but the
> >   cards don't seem to get reset.  So there's nothing to stop a card
> >   battering away at DMA in the meantime.  That seems like a problem
> >   independent of livelock, actually.
> 
> >From reading the code in libxl, it seems libxl__device_pci_reset() is called 
> >by both libxl__device_pci_add() and do_pci_remove().  Isn't do_pci_remove() 
> >called when the pass through device is reassigned to dom0 during a domain 
> >teardown?

Libxl could be too late, though.  When a domain is destroyed, its iommu
tables get torn down in Xen.  So if it has active devices:
 - they can start raising IOMMU faults immediately, and in some
   circumstances libxl might never get to run. 
 - since deassign is implemented as "assign to dom0" they might start 
   DMAing over dom0 memory.
If we can rely on the dom0 tools always completely resetting a domains's
devices before calling domctl_destroydomain, that should never happen.
That seems a bit fragile, though I guess dom0 can shoot itself in the foot in
enough other ways.   I prefer Jean's reset-in-xen approach; it's only a few
hundred lines of code and we could reuse some of it for resetting
badly-behaved cards from the IOMMU fault handler. 

Tim.

-- 
Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>
Principal Software Engineer, Xen Platform Team
Citrix Systems UK Ltd.  (Company #02937203, SL9 0BG)

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