On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 11:04:38AM +0100, Christian König wrote:
On 1/11/26 11:37, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
This series implements a dma-buf “revoke” mechanism: to allow a dma-buf exporter to explicitly invalidate (“kill”) a shared buffer after it has been distributed to importers, so that further CPU and device access is prevented and importers reliably observe failure.
We already have that. This is what the move_notify is all about.
Today, dma-buf effectively provides “if you have the fd, you can keep using the memory indefinitely.” That assumption breaks down when an exporter must reclaim, reset, evict, or otherwise retire backing memory after it has been shared. Concrete cases include GPU reset and recovery where old allocations become unsafe to access, memory eviction/overcommit where backing storage must be withdrawn, and security or isolation situations where continued access must be prevented. While drivers can sometimes approximate this with exporter-specific fencing and policy, there is no core dma-buf state transition that communicates “this buffer is no longer valid; fail access” across all access paths.
It's not correct that there is no DMA-buf handling for this use case.
The change in this series is to introduce a core “revoked” state on the dma-buf object and a corresponding exporter-triggered revoke operation. Once a dma-buf is revoked, new access paths are blocked so that attempts to DMA-map, vmap, or mmap the buffer fail in a consistent way.
In addition, the series aims to invalidate existing access as much as the kernel allows: device mappings are torn down where possible so devices and IOMMUs cannot continue DMA.
The semantics are intentionally simple: revoke is a one-way, permanent transition for the lifetime of that dma-buf instance.
From a compatibility perspective, users that never invoke revoke are unaffected, and exporters that adopt it gain a core-supported enforcement mechanism rather than relying on ad hoc driver behavior. The intent is to keep the interface minimal and avoid imposing policy; the series provides the mechanism to terminate access, with policy remaining in the exporter and higher-level components.
As far as I can see that patch set is completely superfluous.
The move_notify mechanism has been implemented exactly to cover this use case and is in use for a couple of years now.
What exactly is missing?
From what I can tell, the missing piece is what happens after .move_notify() is called. According to the documentation, the exporter remains valid, and the importer is expected to recreate all mappings.
include/linux/dma-buf.h: 471 * Mappings stay valid and are not directly affected by this callback. 472 * But the DMA-buf can now be in a different physical location, so all 473 * mappings should be destroyed and re-created as soon as possible. 474 * 475 * New mappings can be created after this callback returns, and will 476 * point to the new location of the DMA-buf.
Call to dma_buf_move_notify() does not prevent new attachments to that exporter, while "revoke" does. In the current code, the importer is not aware that the exporter no longer exists and will continue calling dma_buf_map_attachment().
In summary, the current implementation allows a single .attach() check but permits multiple .map_dma_buf() calls. With "revoke", we gain the ability to block any subsequent .map_dma_buf() operations.
Main use case is VFIO as exporter and IOMMUFD as importer.
Thanks
Regards, Christian.
BTW, see this megathread [1] for additional context. Ironically, it was posted exactly one year ago.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250107142719.179636-2-yilun.xu@linux.intel.com...
Thanks
Cc: linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-media@vger.kernel.org Cc: dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org Cc: linaro-mm-sig@lists.linaro.org Cc: kvm@vger.kernel.org Cc: iommu@lists.linux.dev To: Jason Gunthorpe jgg@ziepe.ca To: Leon Romanovsky leon@kernel.org To: Sumit Semwal sumit.semwal@linaro.org To: Christian König christian.koenig@amd.com To: Alex Williamson alex@shazbot.org To: Kevin Tian kevin.tian@intel.com To: Joerg Roedel joro@8bytes.org To: Will Deacon will@kernel.org To: Robin Murphy robin.murphy@arm.com
Signed-off-by: Leon Romanovsky leonro@nvidia.com
Leon Romanovsky (4): dma-buf: Introduce revoke semantics vfio: Use dma-buf revoke semantics iommufd: Require DMABUF revoke semantics iommufd/selftest: Reuse dma-buf revoke semantics
drivers/dma-buf/dma-buf.c | 36 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---- drivers/iommu/iommufd/pages.c | 2 +- drivers/iommu/iommufd/selftest.c | 12 ++++-------- drivers/vfio/pci/vfio_pci_dmabuf.c | 27 ++++++--------------------- include/linux/dma-buf.h | 31 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 5 files changed, 74 insertions(+), 34 deletions(-)
base-commit: 9ace4753a5202b02191d54e9fdf7f9e3d02b85eb change-id: 20251221-dmabuf-revoke-b90ef16e4236
Best regards,
Leon Romanovsky leonro@nvidia.com