Yes , definetley.

Regards,
Rami Rosen

On 4/5/07, Muli Ben-Yehuda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
If there's interest, I'll be happy to give this talk I'll be giving at
OLS '07 at Haifux as well.

The Price of Safety: Evaluating IOMMU Performance

IOMMUs, "IO Memory Management Units", are hardware devices that
translate device DMA addresses to machine addresses. Isolation capable
IOMMUs perform a valuable system service, preventing rogue devices
from performing errant or malicious DMAs, thereby substantially
increasing the system's reliability and availability. Without an
IOMMU, a peripheral device could be programmed to overwrite any part
of the system's memory. An isolation capable IOMMU restricts a device
so that it can only access parts of memory it has been explicitly
granted access to. Operating systems utilize IOMMUs to isolate device
drivers; hypervisors utilize IOMMUs to grant secure direct hardware
access to virtual machines. With the imminent publication of the
PCI-SIG's IO Virtualization standard, as well as Intel and AMD's
introduction of isolation capable IOMMUs in all new servers, IOMMUs
will become ubiquitous.

IOMMUs can impose a performance penalty due to the extra memory
accesses required to perform DMA operations. The exact performance
degradation depends on the IOMMU design, its caching architecture, the
way it is programmed and the workload. In this paper, we present the
performance characteristics of the Calgary and DART IOMMUs in Linux,
both on bare metal and hypervisors. We measure the throughput and CPU
utilization of several IO workloads with and without an IOMMU and
analyze the results. We then discuss potential strategies for
mitigating the IOMMU's costs. We conclude by presenting a set of
optimizations we have implemented and the resulting performance
improvements.

Cheers,
Muli

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