Re: [PATCH 41/62] x86/sev-es: Handle MSR events

[Joerg Roedel]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 08:59:39AM -0800, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On 2/13/20 11:23 PM, Joerg Roedel wrote:
> > Yes, investigating this is on the list for future optimizations (besides
> > caching CPUID results). My idea is to use alternatives patching for
> > this. But the exception handling is needed anyway because #VC
> > exceptions happen very early already, basically the first thing after
> > setting up a stack is calling verify_cpu(), which uses CPUID.
> 
> Ahh, bummer.  How does a guest know that it's running under SEV-ES?
> What's the enumeration mechanism if CPUID doesn't "work"?

There are two ways a guest can find out:

	1) Read the SEV_STATUS_MSR and check for the SEV-ES bit
	2) If a #VC exception is raised it also knows it runs as an
	   SEV-ES guest

This patch-set implements both ways at the appropriate stages of the
boot process. Very early it just installs a #VC handler without checking
whether it is running under SEV-ES and handles the exceptions when they
are raised.

Later in the boot process it also reads the SEV_STATUS_MSR and sets a
cpu_feature flag to do alternative patching based on its value.

> > The other reason is that things like MMIO and IOIO instructions can't be
> > easily patched by alternatives. Those would work with the runtime
> > checking you showed above, though.
> 
> Is there a reason we can't make a rule that you *must* do MMIO through
> an accessor function so we *can* patch them?  I know random drivers
> might break the rule, but are SEV-ES guests going to be running random
> drivers?  I would think that they mostly if not all want to use
> virtio.

Yeah, there are already defined accessor functions for MMIO, like
read/write[bwlq] and memcpy_toio/memcpy_fromio. It is probably worth
testing what performance overhead is involved in overloading these to
call directly into the paravirt path when SEV-ES is enabled. With
alternatives patching it would still add a couple of NOPS for the
non-SEV-ES case.

But all that does not remove the need for the #VC exception handler, as
#VC exceptions can also be triggered by user-space, and the instruction
emulation for MMIO will be needed to allow MMIO in user-space (the
patch-set currently does not allow that, but it could be needed in the
future).

Regards,

	Joerg