On 9/4/19 9:44 AM, Jim Mattson wrote:
On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 5:59 PM Krish Sadhukhan
<krish.sadhukhan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 09/01/2019 05:33 PM, Jim Mattson wrote:
On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 4:15 PM Jim Mattson <jmattson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 4:07 PM Krish Sadhukhan
<krish.sadhukhan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 08/29/2019 03:26 PM, Jim Mattson wrote:
On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 2:25 PM Krish Sadhukhan
<krish.sadhukhan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
According to section "Checks on Guest Control Registers, Debug Registers, and
and MSRs" in Intel SDM vol 3C, the following checks are performed on vmentry
of nested guests:
If the "load debug controls" VM-entry control is 1, bits 63:32 in the DR7
field must be 0.
Can't we just let the hardware check guest DR7? This results in
"VM-entry failure due to invalid guest state," right? And we just
reflect that to L1?
Just trying to understand the reason why this particular check can be
deferred to the hardware.
The vmcs02 field has the same value as the vmcs12 field, and the
physical CPU has the same requirements as the virtual CPU.
Actually, you're right. There is a problem. With the current
implementation, there's a priority inversion if the vmcs12 contains
both illegal guest state for which the checks are deferred to
hardware, and illegal entries in the VM-entry MSR-load area. In this
case, we will synthesize a "VM-entry failure due to MSR loading"
rather than a "VM-entry failure due to invalid guest state."
There are so many checks on guest state that it's really compelling to
defer as many as possible to hardware. However, we need to fix the
aforesaid priority inversion. Instead of returning early from
nested_vmx_enter_non_root_mode() with EXIT_REASON_MSR_LOAD_FAIL, we
could induce a "VM-entry failure due to MSR loading" for the next
VM-entry of vmcs02 and continue with the attempted vmcs02 VM-entry. If
hardware exits with EXIT_REASON_INVALID_STATE, we reflect that to L1,
and if hardware exits with EXIT_REASON_INVALID_STATE, we reflect that
to L1 (along with the appropriate exit qualification).
Looking at nested_vmx_exit_reflected(), it seems we do return to L1 if the error is EXIT_REASON_INVALID_STATE. So if we fix the priority inversion, this should work then ?
Yes.
The tricky part is in undoing the successful MSR writes if we reflect
EXIT_REASON_INVALID_STATE to L1. Some MSR writes can't actually be
undone (e.g. writes to IA32_PRED_CMD), but maybe we can get away with
those. (Fortunately, it's illegal to put x2APIC MSRs in the VM-entry
MSR-load area!) Other MSR writes are just a bit tricky to undo (e.g.
writes to IA32_TIME_STAMP_COUNTER).
Let's say that the priority inversion issue is fixed. In the scenario in which the Guest state is fine but the VM-entry MSR-Load area contains an illegal entry, you are saying that the induced "VM-entry failure due to MSR loading" will be caught during the next VM-entry of vmcs02. So how far does the attempted VM-entry of vmcs02 continue with an illegal MSR-Load entry and how do get to the next VM-entry of vmcs02 ?
Sorry; I don't understand the questions.
Let's say that all guest state checks are deferred to hardware and that
they all will pass. Now, the VM-entry MSR-load area contains an illegal
entry and we modify nested_vmx_enter_non_root_mode() to induce a
"VM-entry failure due to MSR loading" for the next VM-entry of vmcs02. I
wanted to understand how that induced error ultimately leads to a
VM-entry failure ?
There are two other scenarios there:
1. Guest state is illegal and VM-entry MSR-Load area contains an illegal entry
2. Guest state is illegal but VM-entry MSR-Load area is fine
In these scenarios, L2 will exit to L1 with EXIT_REASON_INVALID_STATE and finally this will be returned to L1 userspace. Right ? If so, we do we care about reverting MSR-writes because the SDM section 26.8 say,
"Processor state is loaded as would be done on a VM exit (see Section 27.5)"
I'm not sure how the referenced section of the SDM is relevant. Are
you assuming that every MSR in the VM-entry MSR load area also appears
in the VM-exit MSR load area? That certainly isn't the case.
Alternatively, we could perform validity checks on the entire vmcs12
VM-entry MSR-load area before writing any of the MSRs. This may be
easier, but it would certainly be slower. We would have to be wary of
situations where processing an earlier entry affects the validity of a
later entry. (If we take this route, then we would also have to
process the valid prefix of the VM-entry MSR-load area when we reflect
EXIT_REASON_MSR_LOAD_FAIL to L1.)
Forget this paragraph. Even if all of the checks pass, we still have
to undo all of the MSR-writes in the event of a deferred "VM-entry
failure due to invalid guest state."
Note that this approach could be extended to permit the deferral of
some control field checks to hardware as well.
Why can't the first approach be used for VM-entry controls as well ?
Sorry; I don't understand this question either.
Since you mentioned,
"Note that this approach could be extended to permit the deferral
of some control field checks..."
So it seemed that only the second approach was applicable to deferring
VM-entry control checks to hardware. Hence I asked why the first
approach can't be used.
As long as the control
field is copied verbatim from vmcs12 to vmcs02 and the virtual CPU
enforces the same constraints as the physical CPU, deferral should be
fine. We just have to make sure that we induce a "VM-entry failure due
to invalid guest state" for the next VM-entry of vmcs02 if any
software checks on guest state fail, rather than immediately
synthesizing an "VM-entry failure due to invalid guest state" during
the construction of vmcs02.
Is it OK to keep this Guest check in software for now and then remove it once we have a solution in place ?
Why do you feel that getting the priority correct is so important for
this one check in particular? I'd be surprised if any hypervisor ever
assembled a VMCS that failed this check.
