Re: [PATCH v38 14/24] x86/sgx: Add SGX_IOC_ENCLAVE_INIT

[Jethro Beekman]

On 2020-09-22 10:29, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 12:17:00PM -0700, Sean Christopherson wrote:
>> That was effectively my original suggestion as well, check for a stale cache
>> and retry indefinitely.  I capitulated because it did feel like I was being
>> overly paranoid.  I'm obviously ok going the retry indefinitely route :-).
>>
>> https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180904163546.GA5421@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> Right, so if EINIT is so expensive, why does it matter how many cyccles
> WRMSR has? I.e., you don't really need to cache - you simply write the 4
> MSRs and you're done. Simple.
> 
> As to "indefinitely" - caller can increment a counter which counts
> how many times it returned SGX_INVALID_EINITTOKEN. I guess when it
> reaches some too high number which should not be reached during normal
> usage patterns, you can give up and issue a message to say that counter
> reached max retries or so but other than that, you should be ok. That
> thing is running interruptible in a loop anyway...

I don't see why you'd need to retry indefinitely. Yes the MSRs may not match the cached value for “reasons”, but if after you've written them once it still doesn't work, clearly either 1) an “unhelpful” VMM is actively messing with the MSRs which I'd say is at best a VMM bug or 2) there was an EPC reset and your enclave is now invalid anyway, so no need to EINIT.

--
Jethro Beekman | Fortanix

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