Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v3] amd-iommu: remove page merging code

["Woods, Brian" <Brian.Woods@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 09:55:59AM +0000, Paul Durrant wrote:
> The page merging logic makes use of bits 1-8 and bit 63 of a PTE, which
> used to be specified as 'ignored'. However, bits 5 and 6 are now specified
> as 'accessed' and 'dirty' bits and their use only remains safe as long as
> the DTE 'Host Access Dirty' bits remain unused by Xen, or by hardware
> before the domain starts running. (XSA-275 disabled the operation of the
> code after domain creation completes).
> 
> With the page merging logic present in its current form there are no spare
> ignored bits in the PTE at all, but PV-IOMMU support will require at least
> one spare bit to track which PTEs are added by hypercall.
> 
> This patch removes the code, freeing up the remaining PTE ignored bits
> for other use, including PV-IOMMU support, as well as significantly
> simplifying and shortening the source by ~170 lines. There may be some
> marginal performance cost (but none has been observed in manual testing
> with a passed-through NVIDIA GPU) since higher order mappings will now be
> ruled out until a mapping order parameter is passed to iommu_ops. That will
> be dealt with by a subsequent patch though.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Paul Durrant <paul.durrant@xxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Brian Woods <brian.woods@xxxxxxx>

-- 
Brian Woods

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