On Tue, Nov 30, 2021, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > On 11/30/21 09:27, Tian, Kevin wrote: > > r = kvm_arch_hardware_enable(); > > > > if (r) { > > cpumask_clear_cpu(cpu, cpus_hardware_enabled); > > atomic_inc(&hardware_enable_failed); > > pr_info("kvm: enabling virtualization on CPU%d failed\n", cpu); > > } > > } > > > > Upon error hardware_enable_failed is incremented. However this variable > > is checked only in hardware_enable_all() called when the 1st VM is called. > > > > This implies that KVM may be left in a state where it doesn't know a CPU > > not ready to host VMX operations. > > > > Then I'm curious what will happen if a vCPU is scheduled to this CPU. Does > > KVM indirectly catch it (e.g. vmenter fail) and return a deterministic error > > to Qemu at some point or may it lead to undefined behavior? And is there > > any method to prevent vCPU thread from being scheduled to the CPU? > > It should fail the first vmptrld instruction. It will result in a few > WARN_ONCE and pr_warn_ratelimited (see vmx_insn_failed). For VMX this > should be a pretty bad firmware bug, and it has never been reported. KVM did > find some undocumented errata but not this one! Heh, writing MSR_TEST_CTRL on some CPUs, e.g. Haswell, magically disables VMX. Not exactly CPU hotplug, but we got close :-) But yeah, if enabling VMX fails, something in the CPU is badly mangled. 009bce1df0bb ("x86/split_lock: Don't write MSR_TEST_CTRL on CPUs that aren't whitelisted")