Re: [RFC v2 06/10] KVM: arm/arm64: Update the physical timer interrupt level

From: Marc Zyngier
Date: Mon Jan 30 2017 - 12:51:21 EST


On 30/01/17 15:02, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 03:21:06PM +0000, Marc Zyngier wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 27 2017 at 01:04:56 AM, Jintack Lim <jintack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> Now that we maintain the EL1 physical timer register states of VMs,
>>> update the physical timer interrupt level along with the virtual one.
>>>
>>> Note that the emulated EL1 physical timer is not mapped to any hardware
>>> timer, so we call a proper vgic function.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Jintack Lim <jintack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>> ---
>>> virt/kvm/arm/arch_timer.c | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
>>> 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)
>>>
>>> diff --git a/virt/kvm/arm/arch_timer.c b/virt/kvm/arm/arch_timer.c
>>> index 0f6e935..3b6bd50 100644
>>> --- a/virt/kvm/arm/arch_timer.c
>>> +++ b/virt/kvm/arm/arch_timer.c
>>> @@ -180,6 +180,21 @@ static void kvm_timer_update_mapped_irq(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu, bool new_level,
>>> WARN_ON(ret);
>>> }
>>>
>>> +static void kvm_timer_update_irq(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu, bool new_level,
>>> + struct arch_timer_context *timer)
>>> +{
>>> + int ret;
>>> +
>>> + BUG_ON(!vgic_initialized(vcpu->kvm));
>>
>> Although I've added my fair share of BUG_ON() in the code base, I've
>> since reconsidered my position. If we get in a situation where the vgic
>> is not initialized, maybe it would be better to just WARN_ON and return
>> early rather than killing the whole box. Thoughts?
>>
>
> The distinction to me is whether this will cause fatal crashes or
> exploits down the road if we're working on uninitialized data. If all
> that can happen if the vgic is not initialized, is that the guest
> doesn't see interrupts, for example, then a WARN_ON is appropriate.
>
> Which is the case here?
>
> That being said, do we need this at all? This is in the critial path
> and is actually measurable (I know this from my work on the other timer
> series), so it's better to get rid of it if we can. Can we simply
> convince ourselves this will never happen, and is the code ever likely
> to change so that it gets called with the vgic disabled later?

That'd be the best course of action. I remember us reworking some of
that in the now defunct vgic-less series. Maybe we could salvage that
code, if only for the time we spent on it...

Thanks,

M.
--
Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny...