We are pleased to announce that the VFIO/IOMMU/PCI Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference!

The PCI interconnect specification and the devices implementing it are incorporating more and more features aimed at high performance systems. This requires the kernel to coordinate the PCI devices, the IOMMUs they are connected to and the VFIO layer used to manage them (for user space access and device pass-through) so that users (and virtual machines) can use them effectively. The kernel interfaces to control PCI devices have to be designed in-sync for all three subsystems, which implies that there are lots of intersections in the design of kernel control paths for VFIO/IOMMU/PCI requiring kernel code design discussions involving the three subsystems at once.

A successful VFIO/IOMMU/PCI Microconference was held at Linux Plumbers in 2017, where:

• The ground work for paravirtualized IOMMU (virtio-iommu) was defined
• Implementation of surprise removal kernel policy was debated and brought a solution forward
• Advanced Error Reporting (AER) user space interface was proposed and agreed upon
• Configuration Request/Retry Status (CRS) handling and kernel implementation were defined
• Shared Virtual Address (SVA) solutions from x86 and ARM were highlighted and the microconference discussions laid the path towards a unified solution

This year, the microconference will follow up on the previous microconference agendas and focus on ongoing patches review/design aimed at VFIO/IOMMU/PCI subsystems.

Topics for this year include:

• VFIO
  • Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) interface
  • SRIOV/PASID integration
  • Device assignment/sub-assignment
• IOMMU
  • DMA-API layer interactions and how to move towards generic dma-ops for IOMMU drivers
• PCI
  • Resources claiming/assignment consolidation
  • Peer-to-Peer
  • PCI error management
  • prefetchable vs non-prefetchable BAR address mappings (cacheability)
  • Kernel NoSnoop TLP attribute handling
  • CCIX and accelerators management

Come and join us in the discussion in helping Linux keep up with the new features being added to the PCI interconnect specification.

We hope to see you there!