Re: [PATCH v3] Add VIRTIO_F_DMB (Device Memory Buffer)

Demi Marie Obenour <[email protected]> Thu, 6 Aug 2026 12:09:04 -0400
Newsgroups	dev.linux.lists.virtio-comment
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 8/4/26 12:12, Alexander Graf wrote:
> When a transport uses a shared bounce region for virtqueue memory today,
> that region is global and shared by multiple devices at once. Devices
> then contend over one small region, so a busy device can starve the
> others, and one device's emulation cannot be isolated or torn down on its
> own because its state lives in memory everyone else is using too.
> 
> VIRTIO_F_DMB gives each device its own shared memory region, the Device
> Memory Buffer, that holds that device's virtqueues (Descriptor, Driver
> and Device Areas) and the buffers the descriptors reference. When the
> feature is negotiated, every address the driver places in a virtqueue is
> an offset into that region rather than a physical or bus address, so the
> device only ever touches memory the driver placed there. Because each
> device owns its region, its emulation can run in a separate host process
> and be terminated independently, and devices no longer contend over one
> shared region.
> 
> The device reports the region's shmid through a transport-specific
> mechanism (dmb_shm_id in the PCI common configuration structure, DMBSHMId
> on MMIO), so the shmid does not collide with device-specific or future
> transport-specific shared memory regions. The driver locates the region
> through the existing Shared Memory Regions facility. VIRTIO_F_DMB refines
> VIRTIO_F_ACCESS_PLATFORM and is negotiated only together with it.
> 
> To provide the confinement guarantee, the device bounds-checks every
> driver-supplied offset against the region and sets DEVICE_NEEDS_RESET on
> violation.
> 
> The general requirement on shared memory regions forbids a device to
> expose a region used to control its operation or to stream data, and a
> Device Memory Buffer is used for both, so it is named as that
> requirement's exception.
> 
> The Device Memory Buffer is memory the driver shares with the device on
> platforms that distinguish shared from private mappings, and the device
> provides coherency without cache maintenance by the driver. A device
> that requires the platform's barriers offers VIRTIO_F_ORDER_PLATFORM,
> and a driver accepts VIRTIO_F_DMB only together with it. Offset 0 in
> the region is reserved: a device that predates the feature reads a
> Descriptor Area address of 0 as a queue that is not in use, as the
> legacy QueuePFN register states.

I think this is going to be a prerequisite for strongly isolating
vhost-user backends (so they can't compromise the frontend) while
maintaining high performance.  One can use shadow virtqueues, but
this will add extra round-trips.
-- 
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)
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