VFIO/IOMMU/PCI Microconference Accepted into 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference

We are pleased to announce that the VFIO/IOMMU/PCI Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. Today’s high speed components commonly utilize the devices that implement the PCI interconnect specification and the system IOMMUs that provide memory and access control between the devices and the system resources. The features of this domain are constantly increasing with such features as:

Last year’s meetup achieved the following:

  • A path towards converting the Intel IOMMU driver for it to use DMA-IOMMU was defined
  • Support for exposing devices to userspace using either VFIO mdev or userspace DMA was debated and brought a solution forward
  • A discussion was held concerning drivers ability to enable PCI capabilities explicitly without current implicit support through the IOMMU drivers so that the number of newly added quirks can be reduced should there be a broken or buggy feature present. This discussion paved the way closer to a working solution
  • The groundwork for improving security and management of both the internal and external (“trusted” and “untrusted”) devices was discussed defining changes that have to be completed going forward
  • To ease problems with the hot-plug support, two concepts were presented and reviewed: movable BARs and movable bus number. A discourse followed during which the current issues were widely discussed and a possible solution was debated setting a tone for future work
  • A proposal put forward to address the lack of endpoint function drivers ability to perform data transfer between the Root Complex (RC) and Endpoint (EP) leveraging the existing VirtIO infrastructure was reviewed and debated, where then a path forward has been identified
  • A series of enhancements to IOMMU and VFIO user APIs for guest Shared Virtual Address (SVA) have been discussed with work already pending inclusion into the mainline kernel

This year’s topics to be discussed include:

  • VFIO
    • Write-combine on non-x86 architectures
    • I/O Page Fault (IOPF) for passthrough devices
    • Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) interface
    • Single-root I/O Virtualization(SRIOV)/Process Address Space ID (PASID) integration
    • PASID in SRIOV virtual functions
    • Device assignment/sub-assignment
  • IOMMU
    • IOMMU virtualization
    • IOMMU drivers SVA interface
    • I/O Address Space ID Allocator (IOASID) and /dev/ioasid userspace API (uAPI) proposal
    • Possible IOMMU core changes (e.g., better integration with device-driver core, etc.)
  • PCI

Come and join us in the discussion in helping Linux keep up with the new features being added to the PCI interconnect specification.

We hope to see you there.

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