[Spice-devel] [RFC PATCH 1/1] Add a usbredir kernel module to remotely connect USB devices over IP.

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 02-07-15 10:45, Oliver Neukum wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-07-01 at 10:06 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>
>> I don't really think it is sensible to be defining & implementing new
>> network services which can't support strong encryption and authentication.
>> Rather than passing the file descriptor to the kernel and having it do
>> the I/O directly, I think it would be better to dissassociate the kernel
>> from the network transport, and thus leave all sockets layer data I/O
>> to userspace daemons so they can layer in TLS or SASL or whatever else
>> is appropriate for the security need.
>
> Hi,
>
> this hits a fundamental limit. Block IO must be done entirely in kernel
> space or the system will deadlock. The USB stack is part of the block
> layer and the SCSI error handling. Thus if you involve user space you
> cannot honor memory allocation with GFP_NOFS and you break all APIs
> where we pass GFP_NOIO in the USB stack.
>
> Supposed you need to reset a storage device for error handling.
> Your user space programm does a syscall, which allocates memory
> and needs to launder pages. It proceeds to write to the storage device
> you wish to reset.
>
> It is the same problem FUSE has with writable mmap. You cannot do
> block devices in user space sanely.

So how is this dealt with for usbip ?

Regards,

Hans