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[Xen-devel] DomD: passthroughing an arbitrary device



Hi, all!

We have a use-case where we want to passthrough and arbitrary device to driver domain,
e.g. GPIO controller or the like (doesn't do any DMA).
I know that for device to be pass throughed it must be tied to an IOMMU, but in my case the controller doesn’t have any. The problem is that it not only has MMIO range, but also has its own interrupt controller, so I have to passthrough IRQs as well. Here comes the limitation I face: as the controller doesn’t have any IOMMU I can’t
passthrough its IRQ.

Possible solutions I see could be:

1. Make it possible that Xen allows passing through devices without IOMMU assigned: the problem here is that one can hack Xen then by saying that her device is not MMU
protected and writing/reading arbitrary memory then.

2. Make driver domain be marked somehow as a privileged one, so Xen can trust it and
allow passing devices without IOMMU.
Q: What if we need to pass this device to DomU?

3. Workaround by introducing a dummy IOMMU for such devices, but it still doesn’t
solve the problem with memory protection.

I'm hoping to hear any possible solutions/suggestions which will not break security and allow
passing devices at the same time.

Thank you for your time,
Oleksandr


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