Re: [PATCH] drivers/virt: vmgenid: add vm generation id driver

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 08:54:36AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 8:52 AM Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 03:24:08PM +0200, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> > > 4c. The guest kernel maintains an array of physical addresses that are
> > > MADV_WIPEONFORK. The hypervisor knows about this array and its
> > > location through whatever protocol, and before resuming a
> > > moved/snapshotted/duplicated VM, it takes the responsibility for
> > > memzeroing this memory. The huge pro here would be that this
> > > eliminates all races, and reduces complexity quite a bit, because the
> > > hypervisor can perfectly synchronize its bringup (and SMP bringup)
> > > with this, and it can even optimize things like on-disk memory
> > > snapshots to simply not write out those pages to disk.
> > >
> > > A 4c-like approach seems like it'd be a lot of bang for the buck -- we
> > > reuse the existing mechanism (MADV_WIPEONFORK), so there's no new
> > > userspace API to deal with, and it'd be race free, and eliminate a lot
> > > of kernel complexity.
> >
> > Clearly this has a chance to break applications, right?
> > If there's an app that uses this as a non-system-calls way
> > to find out whether there was a fork, it will break
> > when wipe triggers without a fork ...
> > For example, imagine:
> >
> > MADV_WIPEONFORK
> > copy secret data to MADV_DONTFORK
> > fork
> >
> >
> > used to work, with this change it gets 0s instead of the secret data.
> >
> >
> > I am also not sure it's wise to expose each guest process
> > to the hypervisor like this. E.g. each process needs a
> > guest physical address of its own then. This is a finite resource.
> >
> >
> > The mmap interface proposed here is somewhat baroque, but it is
> > certainly simple to implement ...
> 
> Wipe of fork/vmgenid/whatever could end up being much more problematic
> than it naively appears -- it could be wiped in the middle of a read.
> Either the API needs to handle this cleanly, or we need something more
> aggressive like signal-on-fork.
> 
> --Andy


Right, it's not on fork, it's actually when process is snapshotted.

If we assume it's CRIU we care about, then I
wonder what's wrong with something like
MADV_CHANGEONPTRACE_SEIZE
and basically say it's X bytes which change the value...


-- 
MST