Re: [PATCH 2/3] KVM: x86: Add support for VMware guest specific hypercalls

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On Mon, Nov 11, 2024 at 1:49 PM Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 11/9/24 22:11, Doug Covelli wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 9, 2024 at 1:20 PM Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> On 11/8/24 06:03, Zack Rusin wrote:
> >>>>> There's no spec but we have open headers listing the hypercalls.
> >>>>> There's about a 100 of them (a few were deprecated), the full
> >>>>> list starts here:
> >>>>> https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/blob/739c5a2f4bfd4cdda491e6a6f6869d88c0bd6972/open-vm-tools/lib/include/backdoor_def.h#L97
> >>>>> They're not well documented, but the names are pretty self-explenatory.
> >>>>
> >>>> At a quick glance, this one needs to be handled in KVM:
> >>>>
> >>>>     BDOOR_CMD_VCPU_MMIO_HONORS_PAT
> >>>>
> >>>> and these probably should be in KVM:
> >>>>
> >>>>     BDOOR_CMD_GETTIME
> >>>>     BDOOR_CMD_SIDT
> >>>>     BDOOR_CMD_SGDT
> >>>>     BDOOR_CMD_SLDT_STR
> >>>>     BDOOR_CMD_GETTIMEFULL
> >>>>     BDOOR_CMD_VCPU_LEGACY_X2APIC_OK
> >>>>     BDOOR_CMD_STEALCLOCK
> >>>
> >>> I'm not sure if there's any value in implementing a few of them.
> >>
> >> The value is that some of these depend on what the hypervisor does, not
> >> on what userspace does.  For Hypervisor.framework you have a lot of
> >> leeway, for KVM and Hyper-V less so. [..] From the KVM maintainers'
> >> point of view, the feature you're adding might be used by others and
> >> not just VMware Workstation.  Microsoft and Apple might see things
> >> differently (Apple in particular has a much thinner wrapper around
> >> the processor's virtualization capbilities).
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > the SGDT/SLDT/STR/SIDT backdoor calls these were added > 20
> > years ago for SW that used these instructions from CPL3 which did not
> > work well before VT/SVM were introduced.  These are really of no use
> > on modern CPUs and will be blocked if the guest OS has enabled UMIP.
> > [...]
> >
> > For stolen time the backdoor call is [...] currently
> > really only supported by ESX (and only currently used by Photon OS) so
> > I don't think adding that support to KVM is critical.
>
> Sounds good.  All I want is ensuring that someone with access to the
> spec did the exercise.
>
> Still guessing, but for MMIO_HONORS_PAT we probably want to add a
> separate KVM_CHECK_EXTENSION capability.
>
> Is BDOOR_CMD_VCPU_LEGACY_X2APIC_OK something where you can just return a
> constant?
>
> This leaves just GETTIME and GETTIMEFULL.  If four hypercalls require
> some care in the hypervisor (which may or may not be an in-kernel
> implementation), that's not bad.  Can you share a bit more about these four?

BDOOR_CMD_VCPU_MMIO_HONORS_PAT and BDOOR_CMD_VCPU_LEGACY_X2APIC_OK are not
actually backdoor calls - they are flags returned by BDOOR_CMD_GET_VCPU_INFO.

BDOOR_CMD_VCPU_MMIO_HONORS_PAT is only ever set to 1 on ESX as it is only
relevant for PCI passthru which is not supported on Linux/Windows/macOS.  IIRC
this was added over 10 years ago for some Infiniband device vendor to use in
their driver although I'm not sure that ever materialized.

BDOOR_CMD_VCPU_LEGACY_X2APIC_OK indicates if it is OK to use x2APIC w/o
interrupt remapping (e.g a virtual IOMMU).  I'm not sure if KVM supports this
but I think this one can be set to TRUE unconditionally as we have no plans to
use KVM_CREATE_IRQCHIP - if anything we would use KVM_CAP_SPLIT_IRQCHIP although
my preference would be to handle all APIC/IOAPIC/PIC emulation ourselves
provided we can avoid CR8 exits but that is another discussion.

For now I think it makes sense to handle BDOOR_CMD_GET_VCPU_INFO at userlevel
like we do on Windows and macOS.

BDOOR_CMD_GETTIME/BDOOR_CMD_GETTIMEFULL are similar with the former being
deprecated in favor of the latter.  Both do essentially the same thing which is
to return the host OS's time - on Linux this is obtained via gettimeofday.  I
believe this is mainly used by tools to fix up the VM's time when resuming from
suspend.  I think it is fine to continue handling these at userlevel.

Doug

> >> Anyway, one question apart from this: is the API the same for the I/O
> >> port and hypercall backdoors?
> >
> > Yeah the calls and arguments are the same.  The hypercall based
> > interface is an attempt to modernize the backdoor since as you pointed
> > out the I/O based interface is kind of hacky as it bypasses the normal
> > checks for an I/O port access at CPL3.  It would be nice to get rid of
> > it but unfortunately I don't think that will happen in the foreseeable
> > future as there are a lot of existing VMs out there with older SW that
> > still uses this interface.
>
> Yeah, but I think it still justifies that the KVM_ENABLE_CAP API can
> enable the hypercall but not the I/O port.
>
> Paolo
>

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