SMEP is disabled if CPU is in non-paging mode in hardware. However KVM always uses paging mode to emulate guest non-paging mode with HAP. To emulate this behavior, SMEP needs to be manually disabled when guest switches to non-paging mode. We met an issue that, SMP Linux guest with recent kernel (enable SMEP support, for example, 3.5.3) would crash with triple fault if setting unrestricted_guest=0. This is because KVM uses an identity mapping page table to emulate the non-paging mode, where the page table is set with USER flag. If SMEP is still enabled in this case, guest will meet unhandlable page fault and then crash. Signed-off-by: Dongxiao Xu <dongxiao.xu@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Xiantao Zhang <xiantao.zhang@xxxxxxxxx> --- arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c | 8 ++++++++ 1 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c b/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c index 9120ae1..e82f20d 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c +++ b/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c @@ -3155,6 +3155,14 @@ static int vmx_set_cr4(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu, unsigned long cr4) if (!is_paging(vcpu)) { hw_cr4 &= ~X86_CR4_PAE; hw_cr4 |= X86_CR4_PSE; + /* + * SMEP is disabled if CPU is in non-paging mode in + * hardware. However KVM always uses paging mode to + * emulate guest non-paging mode with HAP. + * To emulate this behavior, SMEP needs to be manually + * disabled when guest switches to non-paging mode. + */ + hw_cr4 &= ~X86_CR4_SMEP; } else if (!(cr4 & X86_CR4_PAE)) { hw_cr4 &= ~X86_CR4_PAE; } -- 1.7.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html