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Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2018 02:26:46 +0200
From: Ahmed Soliman <ahmedsoliman0x666@...il.com>
To: Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>
Cc: kvm@...r.kernel.org,
Kernel Hardening <kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com>,
virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org, linux-doc@...r.kernel.org,
"the arch/x86 maintainers" <x86@...nel.org>, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar@...hat.com>,
Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
"H . Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@...aro.org>, David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>,
Boris Lukashev <blukashev@...pervictus.com>, David Vrabel <david.vrabel@...anix.com>,
nigel.edwards@....com, Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] [RFC V3] KVM: X86: Adding skeleton for Memory ROE
On 20 July 2018 at 00:59, Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 11:40 PM Ahmed Abd El Mawgood
> Why are you implementing this in the kernel, instead of doing it in
> host userspace?
I thought about implementing it completely in QEMU but It won't be
possible for few reasons:
- After talking to QEMU folks I came up to conclusion that it when it
comes to managing memory allocated for guest, it is always better to let
KVM handles everything, unless there is a good reason to play with that
memory chunk inside QEMU itself.
- But actually there is a good reason for implementing ROE in kernel space,
it is that ROE is architecture dependent to great extent. I should have
emphasized that the only currently supported architecture is X86. I am
not sure how deep the dependency on architecture goes. But as for now
the current set of patches does a SPTE enumeration as part of the process.
To my best knowledge, this isn't exposed outside arch/x68/kvm let alone
having a host user space interface for it. Also the way I am planning to
protect TLB from malicious gva -> gpa mapping is by knowing that in x86
it is possible to VMEXIT on page faults, I am not sure if it will safe to
assume that all kvm supported architectures will behave this way.
For these reasons I thought it will be better if arch dependent stuff (the
mechanism implementation) is kept in arch/*/kvm folder and with minimal
modifications to virt/kvm/* after setting a kconfig variable to enable ROE.
But I left room for the user space app using kvm to decide the rightful policy
for handling ROE violations. The way it works by KVM_EXIT_MMIO error to user
space, keeping all the architectural details hidden away from user space.
A last note is that I didn't create this from scratch, instead I extended
KVM_MEM_READONLY implementation to also allow R/O per page instead
R/O per whole slot which is already done in kernel space.
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