On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 09:15:56PM +0300, Vlad Zolotarov wrote: > > > On 09/30/15 18:26, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote: > >On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 03:50:09PM +0300, Vlad Zolotarov wrote: > >>How not virtualizing iommu forces "all or nothing" approach? > >Looks like you can't limit an assigned device to only access part of > >guest memory that belongs to a given process. Either let it access all > >of guest memory ("all") or don't assign the device ("nothing"). > > Ok. A question then: can u limit the assigned device to only access part of > the guest memory even if iommu was virtualized?
That's exactly what an iommu does - limit the device io access to memory. > How would iommu > virtualization change anything? Kernel can use an iommu to limit device access to memory of the controlling application. > And why do we care about an assigned device > to be able to access all Guest memory? Because we want to be reasonably sure a kernel memory corruption is not a result of a bug in a userspace application. -- MST