Re: [PATCH 0/3] x86/paravirt: Fix baremetal paravirt MSR ops

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> * Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 12:19 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >
>> > * Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Setting CONFIG_PARAVIRT=y has an unintended side effect: it silently
>> >> turns all rdmsr and wrmsr operations into the safe variants without
>> >> any checks that the operations actually succeed.
>> >>
>> >> This is IMO awful: it papers over bugs.  In particular, KVM gueests
>> >> might be unwittingly depending on this behavior because
>> >> CONFIG_KVM_GUEST currently depends on CONFIG_PARAVIRT.  I'm not
>> >> aware of any such problems, but applying this series would be a good
>> >> way to shake them out.
>> >>
>> >> Fix it so that the MSR operations work the same on CONFIG_PARAVIRT=n
>> >> and CONFIG_PARAVIRT=y as long as Xen isn't being used.  The Xen
>> >> maintainers are welcome to make a similar change on top of this.
>> >>
>> >> Since there's plenty of time before the next merge window, I think
>> >> we should apply and fix anything that breaks.
>> >
>> > No, I think we should at most generate a warning instead, and not crash the kernel
>> > via rdmsr()!
>> >
>> > Most big distro kernels on bare metal have CONFIG_PARAVIRT=y (I checked Ubuntu and
>> > Fedora), so we are potentially exposing a lot of users to problems.
>> >
>> > Crashing the bootup on an unknown MSR is bad. Many MSR reads and writes are
>> > non-critical and returning the 'safe' result is much better than crashing or
>> > hanging the bootup.
>> >
>>
>> Should we do that for CONFIG_PARAVIRT=n, too?
>
> Absolutely. PARAVIRT=n should not behave differently from PARAVIRT=y on bare
> metal.
>
>> It would be straightforward to rig this up (temporarily?) on top of these
>> patches.  To keep bloat down, we might want to implement it in
>> do_general_protection rather than sticking it in native_read_msr.
>
> Fair enough.
>
>> wrmsr is a different beast, since we can fail due to writing the wrong value to
>> an otherwise valid MSR.  Given that MSR screwups can very easily be security
>> holes, I'm not sure that warning and blindly continuing on an unchecked failed
>> wrmsr is a good idea.
>
> So the fact is that right now we are silently ignoring failures there, and have
> been doing that for some time. The right first step is to live with that and start
> generating low-key, once-per-bootup warnings at most, and see how frequent (and
> how serious) they are.
>
> We could add a (default disabled) CONFIG_PANIC_ON_UNKNOWN_MSR=y option if that's
> really a serious concern.

Could we abuse panic_on_oops for this purpose?

>
>> In any event, I think it's nuts that CONFIG_PARAVIRT changes this
>> behavior.  We should pick something sane and stick with it.
>
> Absolutely - and as it happens, the 'does not crash the kernel' PARAVIRT=y
> accidental behavior is actually quite close to what we wanted for a long time, so
> let's make it official - and add a warning to make sure we are aware of problems.
>
> But don't turn 'potential problems' into showstopper bugs such as a hard to debug
> early boot crash, which to most Linux users means a black screen on bootup!
>

Fair enough.

--Andy
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