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Fenghua Yusuryasaimadhu
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Documentation/x86: Update documentation for SVA (Shared Virtual Addressing)
Adjust the documentation to the new way how a PASID is being allocated, freed and fixed up. Based on a patch by Ashok Raj <[email protected]> [ bp: Massage commit message, fix htmldocs build warning ] Signed-off-by: Fenghua Yu <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]> Reviewed-by: Tony Luck <[email protected]> Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
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Documentation/x86/sva.rst

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@@ -104,18 +104,47 @@ The MSR must be configured on each logical CPU before any application
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thread can interact with a device. Threads that belong to the same
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process share the same page tables, thus the same MSR value.
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PASID is cleared when a process is created. The PASID allocation and MSR
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programming may occur long after a process and its threads have been created.
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One thread must call iommu_sva_bind_device() to allocate the PASID for the
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process. If a thread uses ENQCMD without the MSR first being populated, a #GP
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will be raised. The kernel will update the PASID MSR with the PASID for all
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threads in the process. A single process PASID can be used simultaneously
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with multiple devices since they all share the same address space.
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One thread can call iommu_sva_unbind_device() to free the allocated PASID.
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The kernel will clear the PASID MSR for all threads belonging to the process.
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New threads inherit the MSR value from the parent.
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PASID Life Cycle Management
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===========================
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PASID is initialized as INVALID_IOASID (-1) when a process is created.
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Only processes that access SVA-capable devices need to have a PASID
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allocated. This allocation happens when a process opens/binds an SVA-capable
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device but finds no PASID for this process. Subsequent binds of the same, or
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other devices will share the same PASID.
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Although the PASID is allocated to the process by opening a device,
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it is not active in any of the threads of that process. It's loaded to the
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IA32_PASID MSR lazily when a thread tries to submit a work descriptor
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to a device using the ENQCMD.
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That first access will trigger a #GP fault because the IA32_PASID MSR
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has not been initialized with the PASID value assigned to the process
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when the device was opened. The Linux #GP handler notes that a PASID has
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been allocated for the process, and so initializes the IA32_PASID MSR
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and returns so that the ENQCMD instruction is re-executed.
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On fork(2) or exec(2) the PASID is removed from the process as it no
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longer has the same address space that it had when the device was opened.
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On clone(2) the new task shares the same address space, so will be
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able to use the PASID allocated to the process. The IA32_PASID is not
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preemptively initialized as the PASID value might not be allocated yet or
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the kernel does not know whether this thread is going to access the device
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and the cleared IA32_PASID MSR reduces context switch overhead by xstate
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init optimization. Since #GP faults have to be handled on any threads that
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were created before the PASID was assigned to the mm of the process, newly
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created threads might as well be treated in a consistent way.
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Due to complexity of freeing the PASID and clearing all IA32_PASID MSRs in
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all threads in unbind, free the PASID lazily only on mm exit.
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If a process does a close(2) of the device file descriptor and munmap(2)
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of the device MMIO portal, then the driver will unbind the device. The
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PASID is still marked VALID in the PASID_MSR for any threads in the
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process that accessed the device. But this is harmless as without the
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MMIO portal they cannot submit new work to the device.
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