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by stragies 703 days ago
Everything you wrote assumes the IOMMUs across the board to be 100% correctly implemented without errors/bugdoors.

People used to believe similar things about Hyperthreading, glitchability, ME, Cisco, boot-loaders, ... the list goes on.
1 comments
adrian_b 703 days ago
There still is a huge difference between running privileged code on the CPU, for which there is nothing limiting what it can do, and code that runs on a device, which should normally be contained by the I/O MMU, except if the I/O MMU is buggy.

The functions of an I/O MMU for checking and filtering the transfers are very simple, so the probability of non-intentional bugs is extremely small in comparison with the other things enumerated by you.

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stragies 703 days ago
Agreed, that the feature-set of IOMMU is fairly small, but is this function not usually included in one of the Chipset ICs, which do run a lot other code/functions alongside a (hopefully) faithful correct IOMMU routine?

Which -to my eyes- would increase the possibility of other system parts mucking with IOMMU restrictions, and/or triggering bugs.

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