cloud-hypervisor/docs/iommu.md

Virtual IOMMU

Rationales

Having the possibility to expose a virtual IOMMU to the guest can be interesting to support specific use cases. That being said, it is always important to keep in mind a virtual IOMMU can impact the performance of the attached devices, which is the reason why one should be careful when enabling this feature.

Protect nested virtual machines

The first reason why one might want to expose a virtual IOMMU to the guest is to increase the security regarding the memory accesses performed by the virtual devices (VIRTIO devices), on behalf of the guest drivers.

With a virtual IOMMU, the VMM stands between the guest driver and its device counterpart, validating and translating every address before to try accessing the guest memory. This is standard interposition that is performed here by the VMM.

The increased security does not apply for a simple case where we have one VM per VMM. Because the guest cannot be trusted, as we always consider it could be malicious and gain unauthorized privileges inside the VM, preventing some devices from accessing the entire guest memory is pointless.

But let's take the interesting case of nested virtualization, and let's assume we have a VMM running a first layer VM. This L1 guest is fully trusted as the user intends to run multiple VMs from this L1. We can end up with multiple L2 VMs running on a single L1 VM. In this particular case, and without exposing a virtual IOMMU to the L1 guest, it would be possible for any L2 guest to use the device implementation from the host VMM to access the entire guest L1 memory. The virtual IOMMU prevents from this kind of trouble as it will validate the addresses the device is authorized to access.

Achieve VFIO nested

Another reason for having a virtual IOMMU is to allow passing physical devices from the host through multiple layers of virtualization. Let's take as example a system with a physical IOMMU running a VM with a virtual IOMMU. The implementation of the virtual IOMMU is responsible for updating the physical DMA Remapping table (DMAR) everytime the DMA mapping changes. This must happen through the VFIO framework on the host as this is the only userspace interface to interact with a physical IOMMU.

Relying on this update mechanism, it is possible to attach physical devices to the virtual IOMMU, which allows these devices to be passed from L1 to another layer of virtualization.

Why virtio-iommu?

The Cloud Hypervisor project decided to implement the brand new virtio-iommu device in order to provide a virtual IOMMU to its users. The reason being the simplicity brought by the paravirtualization solution. By having one side handled from the guest itself, it removes the complexity of trapping memory page accesses and shadowing them. This is why the project will not try to implement a full emulation of a physical IOMMU.

Pre-requisites

Kernel

Since virtio-iommu has landed partially into the version 5.3 of the Linux kernel, a special branch is needed to get things working with Cloud Hypervisor. By partially, we are talking about x86 specifically, as it is already fully functional for ARM architectures.

Usage

In order to expose a virtual IOMMU to the guest, it is required to create a virtio-iommu device and expose it through the ACPI IORT table. This can be simply achieved by attaching at least one device to the virtual IOMMU.

The way to expose to the guest a specific device as sitting behind this IOMMU is to explicitly tag it from the command line with the option iommu=on.

Not all devices support this extra option, and the default value will always be off since we want to avoid the performance impact for most users who don't need this.

Refer to the command line --help to find out which device support to be attached to the virtual IOMMU.

Below is a simple example exposing the virtio-blk device as attached to the virtual IOMMU:

./cloud-hypervisor \
    --cpus 1 \
    --memory size=512M \
    --disk path=clear-kvm.img,iommu=on \
    --kernel custom-bzImage \
    --cmdline "console=ttyS0 root=/dev/vda3" \

From a guest perspective, it is easy to verify if the device is protected by the virtual IOMMU. Check the directories listed under /sys/kernel/iommu_groups:

ls /sys/kernel/iommu_groups
0

In this case, only one IOMMU group should be created. Under this group, it is possible to find out the b/d/f of the device(s) part of this group.

ls /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/0/devices/
0000:00:03.0

And you can validate the device is the one we expect running lspci:

lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 0d57
00:01.0 Unassigned class [ffff]: Red Hat, Inc. Device 1057
00:02.0 Unassigned class [ffff]: Red Hat, Inc. Virtio console
00:03.0 Mass storage controller: Red Hat, Inc. Virtio block device
00:04.0 Unassigned class [ffff]: Red Hat, Inc. Virtio RNG