LWN: Comments on "Safe device assignment with VFIO"

Kernel ABI

xav — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:50:14 +0000

Does that thing provide the famous stable kernel ABI ?

Safe device assignment with VFIO

dwmw2 — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:26:40 +0000

To be specific: You want interrupt remapping and X2APIC. And beware that there are some crappy BIOSes which explicitly disable X2APIC for reasons I won't go into here because it makes me too grumpy.

Safe device assignment with VFIO

drag — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:05:36 +0000

Here documents the vulnerabilities inherent in non-Interrupt Remapping (IR, DMAR or whatever):

http://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/2011/Software%20A...

Safe device assignment with VFIO

drag — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:55:28 +0000

Please keep in mind with this stuff that unless you have support for "DMA Remapping" a malicious software with access to IOMMU (like a compromised Virtual Machine) has the potential for using interrupts and other hardware features for compromising the host system.

Unless you are using a new version of Intel's VT-d you can be vulnerable.