[dpdk-dev] [Minutes 04/15/2020] Bi-Weekly DPDK Windows Community Call

[Dmitry Kozlyuk]

> > 4. Device can be VA-only with an onboard IOMMU (e.g. Mellanox NICs).  
> 
> Mellanox NICs work also with PA memory.

IIRC, you told us there's something special with Mellanox NICs and IOMMU.

Documentation says (https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/nics/mlx5.html):

	For security reasons and robustness, this driver only deals with
	virtual memory addresses. The way resources allocations are handled
	by the kernel, combined with hardware specifications that allow to
	handle virtual memory addresses directly, ensure that DPDK
	applications cannot access random physical memory (or memory that
	does not belong to the current process).


> DMA_ADAPTER and DMA_IOMMU are kernel interfaces, without any userspace API?

Correct.

-- 
Dmitry Kozlyuk