Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86: Add host physical address width capability

[Laszlo Ersek]

On 07/09/15 22:02, Bandan Das wrote:
> Laszlo Ersek <lersek@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> ...
>> Yes.
>>
>>> Without EPT, you don't
>>> hit the processor limitation with your setup, but the user should nevertheless
>>> still be notified.
>>
>> I disagree.
>>
>>> In fact, I think shadow paging code should also emulate
>>> this behavior if the gpa is out of range.
>>
>> I disagree.
>>
>> There is no "out of range" gpa. QEMU allocates enough memory, and it
>> should be completely transparent to the guest. The fact that it silently
>> breaks with nested paging if the host processor doesn't have enough
>> address bits is a bug (maybe a hardware bug, maybe a KVM bug; I'm not
>> sure, but I suspect it's a hardware bug). In any case the guest
>> shouldn't care at all. It is a *virtual* machine, and the VMM should lie
>> to it plausibly enough. How much RAM, and how many phys address bits the
>> host has, is a performance question, but it should not be a correctness
>> question. A 256 GB guest should run (slowly, but correctly) on a laptop
>> that has only 4 GB of RAM and only 36 phys addr bits, but plenty of swap
>> space.
>>
>> Because otherwise your argument could be extrapolated as "TCG should
>> break too if the gpa is 'out of range'".
>>
>> So, I disagree. Whatever memory you give to the guest should just work
>> (unless of course you want to emulate a small address width for the
>> *VCPU*, but that's absolutely not the use case here). What we have here
>> is a leaky abstraction: a PCPU limitation giving away a lie that the
>> guest should never notice. The guest should be able to use all memory
>> that was specified with QEMU's -m, regardless of TCG vs. KVM-without-EPT
>> vs. KVM-with-EPT. If the last case cannot work (due to hardware
>> limitations), that's fine, but then (and only then) a warning should be
>> printed.
> 
> Hmm... Ok, I understand your point. So, this is more like a EPT
> limitation/bug in that Qemu isn't complaining about the memory assigned
> to the guest but EPT code is breaking owing to the processor physical
> address width.

Exactly.

> And honestly, I now think that this patch just makes the whole
> situation more confusing :) I am wondering if it's just possible for kvm to
> simply throw an error like a EPT misconfiguration or something ..
> 
> Or in other words, if using a hardware assisted mechanism is just not
> possible, KVM will simply not let it run instead of letting a guest
> stuck in boot.

That would be the best solution.

Thanks
Laszlo
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