Re: [PATCH v13 24/35] x86/fred: Add a NMI entry stub for FRED

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



So we have recently discovered an overlooked interaction with VT-x. Immediately before VMENTER and after VMEXIT, CR2 is live with the *guest* CR2. Regardless of if the guest uses FRED or not, this is guest state and SHOULD NOT be corrupted. Furthermore, host state MUST NOT leak into the guest.

NMIs are blocked on VMEXIT if the cause was an NMI, but not for other reasons, so a NMI coming in during this window that then #PFs could corrupt the guest CR2.

Intel is exploring ways to close this hole, but for schedule reasons, it will not be available at the same time as the first implementation of FRED. Therefore, as a workaround, it turns out that the FRED NMI stub *will*, unfortunately, have to save and restore CR2 after all when (at least) Intel KVM is in use.

Note that this is airtight: it does add a performance penalty to the NMI path (two read CR2 in the common case of no #PF), but there is no gap during which a bad CR2 value could be introduced in the guest, no matter in which sequence the events happen.

In theory the performance penalty could be further reduced by conditionalizing this on the NMI happening in the critical region in the KVM code, but it seems to be pretty far from necessary to me.

This obviously was an unfortunate oversight on our part, but the workaround is simple and doesn't affect any non-NMI paths.

	-hpa

On 12/5/23 02:50, Xin Li wrote:
+
+	if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_SMP) && arch_cpu_is_offline(smp_processor_id()))
+		return;
+

This is cut & paste from elsewhere in the NMI code, but I believe the IS_ENABLED() is unnecessary (not to mention ugly): smp_processor_id() should always return zero on UP, and arch_cpu_is_offline() reduces to !(cpu == 0), so this is a statically true condition on UP.

	-hpa




[Index of Archives]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Security]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Linux FS]     [Yosemite Forum]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Samba]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Device Mapper]     [Linux Resources]

  Powered by Linux