Re: [PATCH 0/2] Fix issue with not starting nesting guests on my system

From: Krish Sadhukhan
Date: Tue May 26 2020 - 21:05:19 EST



On 5/23/20 9:14 AM, Maxim Levitsky wrote:
On my AMD machine I noticed that I can't start any nested guests,
because nested KVM (everything from master git branches) complains
that it can't find msr MSR_IA32_UMWAIT_CONTROL which my system doesn't support
at all anyway.

I traced it to the recently added UMWAIT support to qemu and kvm.
The kvm portion exposed the new MSR in KVM_GET_MSR_INDEX_LIST without
checking that it the underlying feature is supported in CPUID.
It happened to work when non nested because as a precation kvm,
tries to read each MSR on host before adding it to that list,
and when read gets a #GP it ignores it.

When running nested, the L1 hypervisor can be set to ignore unknown
msr read/writes (I need this for some other guests), thus this safety
check doesn't work anymore.

V2: * added a patch to setup correctly the X86_FEATURE_WAITPKG kvm capability
* dropped the cosmetic fix patch as it is now fixed in kvm/queue

Best regards,
Maxim Levitsky

Maxim Levitsky (2):
kvm/x86/vmx: enable X86_FEATURE_WAITPKG in KVM capabilities
kvm/x86: don't expose MSR_IA32_UMWAIT_CONTROL unconditionally

arch/x86/kvm/vmx/vmx.c | 3 +++
arch/x86/kvm/x86.c | 4 ++++
2 files changed, 7 insertions(+)

Nit: The added 'break' statement in patch# 2 is not required.

Reviewed-by: Krish Sadhukhan <krish.sadhukhan@xxxxxxxxxx>