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A comment on File Systems, Data Loss and ZFS.

Re:File Systems, Data Loss and ZFS by oakwhiz on Friday September 19, 2014 @09:29AM (#8340376)
>ZFS is operating on a system without an IOMMU (Input Output Memory Management Unit) and a malfunctioning or malicious device modifies its memory.

If a Linux system possessing an IOMMU was booted with iommu=pt as a kernel command line option, does the IOMMU still protect from this type of failure? This option puts the IOMMU into passthrough mode which is required to successfully use peripherals on some motherboards.

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Re:File Systems, Data Loss and ZFS by ryao on Friday September 19, 2014 @10:18AM (#8340591)
No. This mode was introduced specifically for virtualization so that the IOMMU will only restrict access to a guest machine's memory, such as when KVM is in use:

http://lwn.net/Articles/329174/

The only case in which this would help is when ZFS is on the host and a device passed through to a guest malfunctions.

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