Re: [RFC KVM 00/27] KVM Address Space Isolation

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 07:07:36PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 2:09 PM Liran Alon <liran.alon@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > The hope is that the very vast majority of #VMExit handlers will be
> > able to completely run without requiring to switch to full address
> > space. Therefore, avoiding the performance hit of (2).

> > However, for the very few #VMExits that does require to run in full
> > kernel address space, we must first kick the sibling hyperthread
> > outside of guest and only then switch to full kernel address space
> > and only once all hyperthreads return to KVM address space, then
> > allow then to enter into guest.
> 
> What exactly does "kick" mean in this context?  It sounds like you're
> going to need to be able to kick sibling VMs from extremely atomic
> contexts like NMI and MCE.

Yeah, doing the full synchronous thing from NMI/MCE context sounds
exceedingly dodgy, howver..

Realistically they only need to send an IPI to the other sibling; they
don't need to wait for the VMExit to complete or anything else.

And that is something we can do from NMI context -- with a bit of care.
See also arch_irq_work_raise(); specifically we need to ensure we leave
the APIC in an idle state, such that if we interrupted an APIC sequence
it will not suddenly fail/violate the APIC write/state etc.