[dpdk-dev] Why do we need iommu=pt?

Alex Markuze alex at weka.io
Tue Oct 21 09:32:08 CEST 2014


DPDK uses a 1:1 mapping and doesn't support IOMMU.  IOMMU allows for
simpler VM physical address translation.
The second role of IOMMU is to allow protection from unwanted memory access
by an unsafe devise that has DMA privileges. Unfortunately this protection
comes with an extremely high performance costs for high speed nics.

To your question iommu=pt disables IOMMU support for the hypervisor.

On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 1:39 AM, Xie, Huawei <huawei.xie at intel.com> wrote:

>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Shivapriya Hiremath
> > Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 2:59 PM
> > To: dev at dpdk.org
> > Subject: [dpdk-dev] Why do we need iommu=pt?
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > My question is that if the Poll mode  driver used the DMA kernel
> interface
> > to set up its mappings appropriately, would it still require that
> iommu=pt
> > be set?
> > What is the purpose of setting iommu=pt ?
> PMD allocates memory though hugetlb file system, and fills the physical
> address
> into the descriptor.
> pt is used to pass through iotlb translation. Refer to the below link.
> http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0906.2/02129.html
> >
> > Thank you.
>


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