Re: [PATCH v17 18/23] platform/x86: Intel SGX driver

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 2:20 PM Sean Christopherson
<sean.j.christopherson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>

> My brain is still sorting out the details, but I generally like the idea
> of allocating an anon inode when creating an enclave, and exposing the
> other ioctls() via the returned fd.  This is essentially the approach
> used by KVM to manage multiple "layers" of ioctls across KVM itself, VMs
> and vCPUS.  There are even similarities to accessing physical memory via
> multiple disparate domains, e.g. host kernel, host userspace and guest.
>

In my mind, opening /dev/sgx would give you the requisite inode.  I'm
not 100% sure that the chardev infrastructure allows this, but I think
it does.

> The only potential hiccup I can see is the build flow.  Currently,
> EADD+EEXTEND is done via a work queue to avoid major performance issues
> (10x regression) when userspace is building multiple enclaves in parallel
> using goroutines to wrap Cgo (the issue might apply to any M:N scheduler,
> but I've only confirmed the Golang case).  The issue is that allocating
> an EPC page acts like a blocking syscall when the EPC is under pressure,
> i.e. an EPC page isn't immediately available.  This causes Go's scheduler
> to thrash and tank performance[1].

What's the issue, and how does a workqueue help?  I'm wondering if a
nicer solution would be an ioctl to add lots of pages in a single
call.

>
> Alternatively, we could change the EADD+EEXTEND flow to not insert the
> added page's PFN into the owner's process space, i.e. force userspace to
> fault when it runs the enclave.  But that only delays the issue because
> eventually we'll want to account EPC pages, i.e. add a cgroup, at which
> point we'll likely need current->mm anyways.

You should be able to account the backing pages to a cgroup without
actually sticking them into the EPC, no?  Or am I misunderstanding?  I
guess we'll eventually want a cgroup to limit use of the limited EPC
resources.