Hi,
On 2/26/24 10:04, maobibo wrote:
On 2024/2/24 下午5:13, Huacai Chen wrote:
Hi, Bibo,
On Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 11:28 AM Bibo Mao <maobibo@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Instruction cpucfg can be used to get processor features. And there
is trap exception when it is executed in VM mode, and also it is
to provide cpu features to VM. On real hardware cpucfg area 0 - 20
is used. Here one specified area 0x40000000 -- 0x400000ff is used
for KVM hypervisor to privide PV features, and the area can be extended
for other hypervisors in future. This area will never be used for
real HW, it is only used by software.
After reading and thinking, I find that the hypercall method which is
used in our productive kernel is better than this cpucfg method.
Because hypercall is more simple and straightforward, plus we don't
worry about conflicting with the real hardware.
No, I do not think so. cpucfg is simper than hypercall, hypercall can
be in effect when system runs in guest mode. In some scenario like TCG
mode, hypercall is illegal intruction, however cpucfg can work.
While the CPUCFG instruction is universally available, it's also
unprivileged, so any additional CPUCFG behavior also automatically
becomes UAPI, which likely isn't what you expect. Hypervisor
implementation details shouldn't be leaked to userland because it has no
reason to care -- even though userland learns about the capabilities, it
cannot actually access the resources, because relevant CSRs and/or
instructions are privileged. Worse, the unnecessary exposure of
information could be a problem security-wise.
A possible way to preserve the unprivileged CPUCFG behavior would be
acting differently based on guest CSR.CRMD.PLV: only returning data for
the new configuration space when guest is not in PLV3. But this behavior
isn't explicitly allowed nor disallowed in the LoongArch manuals, and is
in my opinion unnecessarily complex.
And regarding the lack of hypcall support from QEMU system mode
emulation on TCG, I'd argue it's simply a matter of adding support in
target/loongarch64. This would be attractive because it will enable easy
development and testing of hypervisor software with QEMU -- both locally
and in CI.
Extioi virtualization extension will be added later, cpucfg can be
used to get extioi features. It is unlikely that extioi driver depends
on PARA_VIRT macro if hypercall is used to get features.
And the EXTIOI feature too isn't something usable from unprivileged
code, so I don't think it will affect the conclusions above.
--
WANG "xen0n" Xuerui
Linux/LoongArch mailing list: https://lore.kernel.org/loongarch/
