Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v2] libxl: disallow PCI device assignment for HVM guest when PoD is enabled

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14/01/14 14:50, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Mon, 2014-01-13 at 11:52 +0000, Wei Liu wrote:
>> This replicates a Xend behavior, see ec789523749 ("xend: Dis-allow
>> device assignment if PoD is enabled.").
>>
>> This change is restricted to HVM guest, as only HVM is relevant in the
>> counterpart in Xend. We're late in release cycle so the change should
>> only do what's necessary. Probably we can revisit it if we need to do
>> the same thing for PV guest in the future.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Wei Liu <wei.liu2@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Acked-by: Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Release hat: The risk here is of a false positive detecting whether PoD
> would be used and therefore refusing to start a domain. However Wei
> directed me earlier on to the code in setup_guest which sets
> XENMEMF_populate_on_demand and I believe it is using the same logic.
>
> The benefit of this is that it will stop people starting a domain in an
> invalid configuration -- but what is the downside here? Is it an
> unhandled IOMMU fault or another host-fatal error? That would make the
> argument for taking this patch pretty strong. On the other hand if the
> failure were simply to kill this domain, that would be a less serious
> issue and I'd be in two minds, mainly due to George not being here to
> confirm that the pod_enabled logic is correct (although if he were here
> I wouldn't be wrestling with this question at all ;-)).
>
> I'm leaning towards taking this fix, but I'd really like to know what
> the current failure case looks like.
>
> Ian.

The answer is likely hardware specific.

An IOMMU fault (however handled by Xen) will result in a master abort on
the DMA transaction for the PCI device which has suffered the fault. 
That device can then do anything from continue blindly to issuing an NMI
IOCK/SERR which will likely be fatal to the entire server.

~Andrew

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