Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] arm64: handle NOTIFY_SEI notification by the APEI driver

[James Morse]

Hi Mark, Dongjiu Geng,

On 31/05/18 12:01, Mark Rutland wrote:
> In do_serror() we already handle nmi_{enter,exit}(), so there's no need
> for that here.

Even better: nmi_enter() has a BUG_ON(in_nmi()).


> TBH, I don't understand why do_sea() does that conditionally today.
> Unless there's some constraint I'm missing, 

APEI uses a different fixmap entry and locks when in_nmi(). This was because we
may interrupt the irq-masked region in APEI that was using the regular memory.
(e.g. the 'polled' notification, or something backed by an interrupt.) But,
Borislav has spotted other things in here that are broken[0]. I'm working on
rolling all that into 'v5' of the in_nmi() rework stuff.

We currently get away with this on arm because 'SEA' is the only NMI-like thing,
and it occurs synchronously. The problem cases are all also cases where the
kernel text is corrupt, which we can't possibly hope to handle.

For NOTIFY_SDEI and NOTIFY_SEI this is the wrong pattern as these are
asynchronous. do_serror() has already done most of the work for NOTIFY_SEI, but
we need to use the estatus queue in APEI, which is currently x86 only.


> I think it would make more
> sense to do that regardless of whether the interrupted context had
> interrupts enabled. James -- does that make sense to you?
> 
> If you update the prior patch with a stub for !CONFIG_ACPI_APEI_SEI, you
> can simplify all of the above additions down to:
> 
> 	if (!ghes_notify_sei())
> 		return;
> 
> ... which would look a lot nicer.

The code that calls ghes_notify_sei() may need calling by KVM too, but its
default action to an 'unclaimed' SError will be different.
Because of the race between memory_failure() and return-to-userspace, we may
need to kick the irq work queue (if we can), as we return from do_serror(). [1]
and [2] provide an example for NOTIFY_SEA. SDEI does this by returning to the
kernel through the IRQ handler, (which handles the KVM case too).


I think this series is unsafe until we can use the estatus queue in APEI. Its
also missing the handling for an SError interrupting a KVM guest.


Thanks,

James

[0] https://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg653332.html
[1] https://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg649237.html
[2] https://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg649239.html