Hi Michael, Thanks for your patch! On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 5:13 PM Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > vhost is currently broken on the some ARM configs. > > The reason is that the ring element addresses are passed between > components with different alignments assumptions. Thus, if > guest selects a pointer and host then gets and dereferences > it, then alignment assumed by the host's compiler might be > greater than the actual alignment of the pointer. > compiler on the host from assuming pointer is aligned. > > This actually triggers on ARM with -mabi=apcs-gnu - which is a > deprecated configuration. With this OABI, compiler assumes that > all structures are 4 byte aligned - which is stronger than > virtio guarantees for available and used rings, which are > merely 2 bytes. Thus a guest without -mabi=apcs-gnu running > on top of host with -mabi=apcs-gnu will be broken. > > The correct fix is to force alignment of structures - however > that is an intrusive fix that's best deferred until the next release. > > We didn't previously support such ancient systems at all - this surfaced > after vdpa support prompted removing dependency of vhost on > VIRTULIZATION. So for now, let's just add something along the lines of > > depends on !ARM || AEABI > > to the virtio Kconfig declaration, and add a comment that it has to do > with struct member alignment. > > Note: we can't make VHOST and VHOST_RING themselves have > a dependency since these are selected. Add a new symbol for that. Adding the dependencies to VHOST and VHOST_RING themselves is indeed not sufficient. But IMHO you should still add VHOST_DPN dependencies t these two symbols, so any driver selecting them without fulfilling the VHOST_DPN dependency will trigger a Kconfig warning. Else the issue will be ignored silently. > We should be able to drop this dependency down the road. > > Fixes: 20c384f1ea1a0bc7 ("vhost: refine vhost and vringh kconfig") > Suggested-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@xxxxxxxxxx> > Suggested-by: Richard Earnshaw <Richard.Earnshaw@xxxxxxx> > Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds _______________________________________________ Virtualization mailing list Virtualization@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/virtualization