Re: [PATCH 2/2] cpu: intel, amd: mask cleared cpuid features

[Vladimir Davydov]

On 07/24/2012 04:34 PM, Andre Przywara wrote:
> On 07/24/2012 01:09 PM, Vladimir Davydov wrote:
> > On 07/24/2012 02:10 PM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 12:29:19PM +0400, Vladimir Davydov wrote:
> > > > I guess that when the more advanced features become widely-used,
> > > > vendors will offer new MSRs and/or CPUID faulting.
> > > And this right there is the dealbreaker:
> > >
> > > So what are you doing for cpus which have the advanced CPUID features
> > > leafs but there are no MSRs to turn those bits off?
> > We have not encountered this situation in our environments and I hope we
> > won't :-)
> >
> > But look, these CPUID functions cover majority of CPU features, don't
> > they? So, most of "normal" apps inside VM will survive migration.
> > Perhaps, some low-level utils won't. I guess that's why there are no
> > MSRs for other levels provided by vendors.
> You have the new feature leaf at EAX=7. This contains things like BMI
> and AVX2 and probably more upcoming features.
> So you may be safe for a while, but you need a solution in the long run.
>
> > > You surely need some software-only solution for the migration to work,
> > > no?
> > Yes.
> >
> > > If so, why not apply that solution to your hypervisor without touching
> > > the kernel at all?
> > In most hypervisor-based virtualization products, this is already
> > implemented using VMM-exits, so that each VM can have arbitrary CPUID
> > mask set by the admin.
> >
> > The problem is that we have no hypervisor. "Virtualization" we want this
> > feature for is based on cgroups and namespaces (examples are OpenVZ and
> > mainstream LXC). Tasks are just grouped into virtual environments and
> > share the same kernel, which is proved to be more memory usage efficient
> > than traditional hypervisor-based approaches.
> So for this single kernel approach I'd understand it that way:
> 1. You boot up the kernel on the host, it should detect and enable all
> the features, say MCA.
> 2. After boot, you use /src/msr-tools/wrmsr to mask CPUID bits, again
> MCA for instance or AVX/AES or the like.
> Since the (host side of the) kernel already detected it, this does not
> hurt the kernel features like MCA. But AVX will not be available to
> applications running in the "host container", which is probably OK since
> these are mostly management applications, right?
> 3. Then you start guests. The guest's libc will not detect the features
> because of the MSR masking. All you need now is /proc/cpuinfo filtering
> to make this bullet-proof, preferably through the container
> functionality. I see that you do already massive sysfs filtering and
> also /proc/<pid>  filtering, so this maybe an option?

Yes, we do filter /proc/cpuinfo output in our product (OpenVZ), but 
there is also the LXC project that is based completely on the mainstream 
kernel. LXC developers have not faced the cross-vendor migration problem 
yet because currently they don't have migration at all, but they will 
surely face it in future since the work on migration is in progress now 
(CRIU).

So, you prefer adding some filtering of /proc/cpuinfo into the 
mainstream kernel (not now, later, for LXC to work) instead of enabling 
clearcpuid boot option to mask CPUID features? IMO, the latter would 
look clearer.

> This approach does not need any kernel support (except for the
> /proc/cpuinfo filtering). Does this address the issues you have?
>
> Regards,
> Andre.

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