"Intel-IOMMU: enabled": It doesn't mean what you think it means

A quick post just because I keep seeing this in practically every how-to guide I come across.  The instructions grep dmesg for "IOMMU" and come up with either "Intel-IOMMU: enabled" or "DMAR: IOMMU enabled". Clearly that means it's enabled, right? Wrong. That line comes from a __setup() function that parses the options for "intel_iommu=". Nothing has been done at that point, not even a check to see if VT-d hardware is present. Pass intel_iommu=on as a boot option to an AMD system and you'll see this line. Yes, this is clearly not a very intuitive message. So for the record, the mouthful that you should be looking for is this line:

DMAR: Intel(R) Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O

or on older kernels the prefix is different:

PCI-DMA: Intel(R) Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O

When you see this, you're pretty much past all the failure points of initializing VT-d. FWIW, the "DMAR" flavors of the above appeared in v4.2, so on a more recent kernel, that's your better option.