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Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0/1] drm/xen-zcopy: Add Xen zero-copy helper
 DRM driver
To:     Paul Durrant <Paul.Durrant@citrix.com>,
        Roger Pau Monne <roger.pau@citrix.com>
Cc:     "jgross@suse.com" <jgross@suse.com>,
        Artem Mygaiev <Artem_Mygaiev@epam.com>,
        Dongwon Kim <dongwon.kim@intel.com>,
        "airlied@linux.ie" <airlied@linux.ie>,
        "Oleksandr_Andrushchenko@epam.com" <Oleksandr_Andrushchenko@epam.com>,
        "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org" <dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org>,
        "Potrola, MateuszX" <mateuszx.potrola@intel.com>,
        "xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org" <xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org>,
        "daniel.vetter@intel.com" <daniel.vetter@intel.com>,
        "boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com" <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>,
        Matt Roper <matthew.d.roper@intel.com>
References: <20180329131931.29957-1-andr2000@gmail.com>
 <5d8fec7f-956c-378f-be90-f45029385740@gmail.com>
 <20180416192905.GA18096@downor-Z87X-UD5H>
 <20180417075928.GT31310@phenom.ffwll.local>
 <20180417205744.GA15930@downor-Z87X-UD5H>
 <41487acb-a67a-8933-d0c3-702c19b0938e@gmail.com>
 <20180418073508.ptvntwedczpvl7bx@MacBook-Pro-de-Roger.local>
 <ebcbf6ce-1d7a-5f3e-cff8-546d1c010e59@gmail.com>
 <20180418101058.hyqk3gr3b2ibxswu@MacBook-Pro-de-Roger.local>
 <7d6710a76b9a42299139d7914358ed52@AMSPEX02CL03.citrite.net>
From:   Oleksandr Andrushchenko <andr2000@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <3c56505c-8f03-e49b-a995-a2118d255164@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed, 18 Apr 2018 13:21:23 +0300
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On 04/18/2018 01:18 PM, Paul Durrant wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Xen-devel [mailto:xen-devel-bounces@lists.xenproject.org] On Behalf
>> Of Roger Pau Monné
>> Sent: 18 April 2018 11:11
>> To: Oleksandr Andrushchenko <andr2000@gmail.com>
>> Cc: jgross@suse.com; Artem Mygaiev <Artem_Mygaiev@epam.com>;
>> Dongwon Kim <dongwon.kim@intel.com>; airlied@linux.ie;
>> Oleksandr_Andrushchenko@epam.com; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; dri-
>> devel@lists.freedesktop.org; Potrola, MateuszX
>> <mateuszx.potrola@intel.com>; xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org;
>> daniel.vetter@intel.com; boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com; Matt Roper
>> <matthew.d.roper@intel.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0/1] drm/xen-zcopy: Add Xen zero-copy
>> helper DRM driver
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 11:01:12AM +0300, Oleksandr Andrushchenko
>> wrote:
>>> On 04/18/2018 10:35 AM, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 09:38:39AM +0300, Oleksandr Andrushchenko
>> wrote:
>>>>> On 04/17/2018 11:57 PM, Dongwon Kim wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 09:59:28AM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
>>>>>>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 12:29:05PM -0700, Dongwon Kim wrote:
>>>>> 3.2 Backend exports dma-buf to xen-front
>>>>>
>>>>> In this case Dom0 pages are shared with DomU. As before, DomU can
>> only write
>>>>> to these pages, not any other page from Dom0, so it can be still
>> considered
>>>>> safe.
>>>>> But, the following must be considered (highlighted in xen-front's Kernel
>>>>> documentation):
>>>>>    - If guest domain dies then pages/grants received from the backend
>> cannot
>>>>>      be claimed back - think of it as memory lost to Dom0 (won't be used
>> for
>>>>> any
>>>>>      other guest)
>>>>>    - Misbehaving guest may send too many requests to the backend
>> exhausting
>>>>>      its grant references and memory (consider this from security POV).
>> As the
>>>>>      backend runs in the trusted domain we also assume that it is trusted
>> as
>>>>> well,
>>>>>      e.g. must take measures to prevent DDoS attacks.
>>>> I cannot parse the above sentence:
>>>>
>>>> "As the backend runs in the trusted domain we also assume that it is
>>>> trusted as well, e.g. must take measures to prevent DDoS attacks."
>>>>
>>>> What's the relation between being trusted and protecting from DoS
>>>> attacks?
>>> I mean that we trust the backend that it can prevent Dom0
>>> from crashing in case DomU's frontend misbehaves, e.g.
>>> if the frontend sends too many memory requests etc.
>>>> In any case, all? PV protocols are implemented with the frontend
>>>> sharing pages to the backend, and I think there's a reason why this
>>>> model is used, and it should continue to be used.
>>> This is the first use-case above. But there are real-world
>>> use-cases (embedded in my case) when physically contiguous memory
>>> needs to be shared, one of the possible ways to achieve this is
>>> to share contiguous memory from Dom0 to DomU (the second use-case
>> above)
>>>> Having to add logic in the backend to prevent such attacks means
>>>> that:
>>>>
>>>>    - We need more code in the backend, which increases complexity and
>>>>      chances of bugs.
>>>>    - Such code/logic could be wrong, thus allowing DoS.
>>> You can live without this code at all, but this is then up to
>>> backend which may make Dom0 down because of DomU's frontend doing
>> evil
>>> things
>> IMO we should design protocols that do not allow such attacks instead
>> of having to defend against them.
>>
>>>>> 4. xen-front/backend/xen-zcopy synchronization
>>>>>
>>>>> 4.1. As I already said in 2) all the inter VM communication happens
>> between
>>>>> xen-front and the backend, xen-zcopy is NOT involved in that.
>>>>> When xen-front wants to destroy a display buffer (dumb/dma-buf) it
>> issues a
>>>>> XENDISPL_OP_DBUF_DESTROY command (opposite to
>> XENDISPL_OP_DBUF_CREATE).
>>>>> This call is synchronous, so xen-front expects that backend does free
>> the
>>>>> buffer pages on return.
>>>>>
>>>>> 4.2. Backend, on XENDISPL_OP_DBUF_DESTROY:
>>>>>     - closes all dumb handles/fd's of the buffer according to [3]
>>>>>     - issues DRM_IOCTL_XEN_ZCOPY_DUMB_WAIT_FREE IOCTL to xen-
>> zcopy to make
>>>>> sure
>>>>>       the buffer is freed (think of it as it waits for dma-buf->release
>>>>> callback)
>>>> So this zcopy thing keeps some kind of track of the memory usage? Why
>>>> can't the user-space backend keep track of the buffer usage?
>>> Because there is no dma-buf UAPI which allows to track the buffer life cycle
>>> (e.g. wait until dma-buf's .release callback is called)
>>>>>     - replies to xen-front that the buffer can be destroyed.
>>>>> This way deletion of the buffer happens synchronously on both Dom0
>> and DomU
>>>>> sides. In case if DRM_IOCTL_XEN_ZCOPY_DUMB_WAIT_FREE returns
>> with time-out
>>>>> error
>>>>> (BTW, wait time is a parameter of this IOCTL), Xen will defer grant
>>>>> reference
>>>>> removal and will retry later until those are free.
>>>>>
>>>>> Hope this helps understand how buffers are synchronously deleted in
>> case
>>>>> of xen-zcopy with a single protocol command.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think the above logic can also be re-used by the hyper-dmabuf driver
>> with
>>>>> some additional work:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1. xen-zcopy can be split into 2 parts and extend:
>>>>> 1.1. Xen gntdev driver [4], [5] to allow creating dma-buf from grefs and
>>>>> vise versa,
>>>> I don't know much about the dma-buf implementation in Linux, but
>>>> gntdev is a user-space device, and AFAICT user-space applications
>>>> don't have any notion of dma buffers. How are such buffers useful for
>>>> user-space? Why can't this just be called memory?
>>> A dma-buf is seen by user-space as a file descriptor and you can
>>> pass it to different drivers then. For example, you can share a buffer
>>> used by a display driver for scanout with a GPU, to compose a picture
>>> into it:
>>> 1. User-space (US) allocates a display buffer from display driver
>>> 2. US asks display driver to export the dma-buf which backs up that buffer,
>>> US gets buffer's fd: dma_buf_fd
>>> 3. US asks GPU driver to import a buffer and provides it with dma_buf_fd
>>> 4. GPU renders contents into display buffer (dma_buf_fd)
>> After speaking with Oleksandr on IRC, I think the main usage of the
>> gntdev extension is to:
>>
>> 1. Create a dma-buf from a set of grant references.
>> 2. Share dma-buf and get a list of grant references.
>>
>> I think this set of operations could be broken into:
>>
>> 1.1 Map grant references into user-space using the gntdev.
>> 1.2 Create a dma-buf out of a set of user-space virtual addresses.
>>
>> 2.1 Map a dma-buf into user-space.
>> 2.2 Get grefs out of the user-space addresses where the dma-buf is
>>      mapped.
>>
>> So it seems like what's actually missing is a way to:
>>
>>   - Create a dma-buf from a list of user-space virtual addresses.
>>   - Allow to map a dma-buf into user-space, so it can then be used with
>>     the gntdev.
>>
>> I think this is generic enough that it could be implemented by a
>> device not tied to Xen. AFAICT the hyper_dma guys also wanted
>> something similar to this.
>>
>>> Finally, this is indeed some memory, but a bit more [1]
>>>> Also, (with my FreeBSD maintainer hat) how is this going to translate
>>>> to other OSes? So far the operations performed by the gntdev device
>>>> are mostly OS-agnostic because this just map/unmap memory, and in fact
>>>> they are implemented by Linux and FreeBSD.
>>> At the moment I can only see Linux implementation and it seems
>>> to be perfectly ok as we do not change Xen's APIs etc. and only
>>> use the existing ones (remember, we only extend gntdev/balloon
>>> drivers, all the changes in the Linux kernel)
>>> As the second note I can also think that we do not extend gntdev/balloon
>>> drivers and have re-worked xen-zcopy driver be a separate entity,
>>> say drivers/xen/dma-buf
>>>>> implement "wait" ioctl (wait for dma-buf->release): currently these are
>>>>> DRM_XEN_ZCOPY_DUMB_FROM_REFS,
>> DRM_XEN_ZCOPY_DUMB_TO_REFS and
>>>>> DRM_XEN_ZCOPY_DUMB_WAIT_FREE
>>>>> 1.2. Xen balloon driver [6] to allow allocating contiguous buffers (not
>>>>> needed
>>>>> by current hyper-dmabuf, but is a must for xen-zcopy use-cases)
>>>> I think this needs clarifying. In which memory space do you need those
>>>> regions to be contiguous?
>>> Use-case: Dom0 has a HW driver which only works with contig memory
>>> and I want DomU to be able to directly write into that memory, thus
>>> implementing zero copying
>>>> Do they need to be contiguous in host physical memory, or guest
>>>> physical memory?
>>> Host
>>>> If it's in guest memory space, isn't there any generic interface that
>>>> you can use?
>>>>
>>>> If it's in host physical memory space, why do you need this buffer to
>>>> be contiguous in host physical memory space? The IOMMU should hide
>> all
>>>> this.
>>> There are drivers/HW which can only work with contig memory and
>>> if it is backed by an IOMMU then still it has to be contig in IPA
>>> space (real device doesn't know that it is actually IPA contig, not PA)
>> What's IPA contig?
> I assume 'IPA' means 'IOMMU Physical Address'. I wonder whether this means what I've termed 'Bus Address' elsewhere?
sorry for not being clear here: I mean that the device sees contiguous 
range of
Intermediate Phys Addresses
>    Paul
>
>> Thanks, Roger.
>>
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