> Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com> writes:
>
> > On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:54:30AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
>
> >> So this call amd_iommu_flush_all_devices() will be able to tell devices
> >> that don't do any more DMAs and hence it is safe to reprogram iommu
> >> mapping entries.
> >>
> > It blocks the cpu until any pending DMA operations are complete. Hmm, as I
> > think about it, there is still a small possibility that a device like a NIC
> > which has several buffers pre-dma-mapped could start a new dma before we
> > completely disabled the iommu, althought thats small. I never saw that in my
> > testing, but hitting that would be fairly difficult I think, since its literally
> > just a few hundred cycles between the flush and the actual hardware disable
> > operation.
> >
> > According to this though:
> >
http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/34434-IOMMU-Rev_1.26_2-11-09.pdf
> > That window could be closed fairly easily, but simply disabling read and write
> > permissions for each device table entry prior to calling flush. If we do that,
> > then flush the device table, any subsequently started dma operation would just
> > get noted in the error log, which we could ignore, since we're abot to boot to
> > the kdump kernel anyway.
> >
> > Would you like me to respin w/ that modification?
>
> Disabling permissions on all devices sounds good for the new virtualization
> capable iommus. I think older iommus will still be challenged. I think
> on x86 we have simply been able to avoid using those older iommus.
>
> I like the direction you are going but please let's put this in a
> paranoid iommu enable routine.
>
