Re: [PATCH v2] x86/kvm: Disable KVM_ASYNC_PF_SEND_ALWAYS

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 09/04/20 16:13, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 09/04/2020 13:47, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> On 09/04/20 06:50, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> The small
>>> (or maybe small) one is that any fancy protocol where the guest
>>> returns from an exception by doing, logically:
>>>
>>> Hey I'm done;  /* MOV somewhere, hypercall, MOV to CR4, whatever */
>>> IRET;
>>>
>>> is fundamentally racy.  After we say we're done and before IRET, we
>>> can be recursively reentered.  Hi, NMI!
>> That's possible in theory.  In practice there would be only two levels
>> of nesting, one for the original page being loaded and one for the tail
>> of the #VE handler.  The nested #VE would see IF=0, resolve the EPT
>> violation synchronously and both handlers would finish.  For the tail
>> page to be swapped out again, leading to more nesting, the host's LRU
>> must be seriously messed up.
>>
>> With IST it would be much messier, and I haven't quite understood why
>> you believe the #VE handler should have an IST.
> 
> Any interrupt/exception which can possibly occur between a SYSCALL and
> re-establishing a kernel stack (several instructions), must be IST to
> avoid taking said exception on a user stack and being a trivial
> privilege escalation.

Doh, of course.  I always confuse SYSCALL and SYSENTER.

> Therefore, it doesn't really matter if KVM's paravirt use of #VE does
> respect the interrupt flag.  It is not sensible to build a paravirt
> interface using #VE who's safety depends on never turning on
> hardware-induced #VE's.

No, I think we wouldn't use a paravirt #VE at this point, we would use
the real thing if available.

It would still be possible to switch from the IST to the main kernel
stack before writing 0 to the reentrancy word.

Paolo