11–13 Dec 2025
Asia/Tokyo timezone

IOMMU State Preservation for Kernel Liveupdate

Not scheduled
20m
Live Update MC Live Update MC

Speaker

Samiullah Khawaja

Description

During a kernel live update, devices owned by a virtual machine may continue to perform DMA operations. For these operations to succeed, the IOMMU state must be preserved. Normally, a kexec reboot would reinitialize the IOMMU, causing the loss of all state and pre-existing DMA mappings.

To prevent this loss and ensure device continuity, the DMA mappings setup for a preserved device must also be preserved. This necessitates preserving the existing IOMMU state, allowing the device to continue its DMA without interruption across the kernel update.

Content

  • Preserve IOMMUFDs
  • Preserve IOMMU domain
  • What state is saved, and how the process works.
  • How the preserved state is restored in the new kernel.
  • Verification.

Primary author

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.