[justinclift]

Personally, I somewhat wonder about that. The firmware (proprietary) which runs on the gpu seems like it'll have access to do things over the gpu PCIe bus, including read system memory, and access other devices (including network gear). Reading memory of remote hosts (ie RDMA) is also a thing which Nvidia gpus can do.

[foresto]

Is that not solvable using an IOMMU (assuming hardware that has one)?

[justinclift]

No idea personally. :)

[riehwvfbk]

An IOMMU does solve it, at the cost of some performance. The GPU can only access memory that the IOMMU allows, and the part that programs the IOMMU is open source.

RDMA requires a special network card and is opt-in - an RDMA NIC cannot access any random memory, only specially registered regions. One could argue that a NIC FW bug could cause arbitrary memory accesses, but that's another place where an IOMMU would help.

[justinclift]

Awesome, thanks. :)