Re: [PATCH Part2 RFC v2 08/37] x86/sev: Split the physmap when adding the page in RMP table

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 5:39 AM Brijesh Singh <brijesh.singh@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The integrity guarantee of SEV-SNP is enforced through the RMP table.
> The RMP is used in conjuntion with standard x86 and IOMMU page
> tables to enforce memory restrictions and page access rights. The
> RMP is indexed by system physical address, and is checked at the end
> of CPU and IOMMU table walks. The RMP check is enforced as soon as
> SEV-SNP is enabled globally in the system. Not every memory access
> requires an RMP check. In particular, the read accesses from the
> hypervisor do not require RMP checks because the data confidentiality
> is already protected via memory encryption. When hardware encounters
> an RMP checks failure, it raise a page-fault exception. The RMP bit in
> fault error code can be used to determine if the fault was due to an
> RMP checks failure.
>
> A write from the hypervisor goes through the RMP checks. When the
> hypervisor writes to pages, hardware checks to ensures that the assigned
> bit in the RMP is zero (i.e page is shared). If the page table entry that
> gives the sPA indicates that the target page size is a large page, then
> all RMP entries for the 4KB constituting pages of the target must have the
> assigned bit 0. If one of entry does not have assigned bit 0 then hardware
> will raise an RMP violation. To resolve it, split the page table entry
> leading to target page into 4K.
>
> This poses a challenge in the Linux memory model. The Linux kernel
> creates a direct mapping of all the physical memory -- referred to as
> the physmap. The physmap may contain a valid mapping of guest owned pages.
> During the page table walk, the host access may get into the situation where
> one of the pages within the large page is owned by the guest (i.e assigned
> bit is set in RMP). A write to a non-guest within the large page will
> raise an RMP violation. To workaround it, call set_memory_4k() to split
> the physmap before adding the page in the RMP table. This ensures that the
> pages added in the RMP table are used as 4K in the physmap.
>
> The spliting of the physmap is a temporary solution until the kernel page
> fault handler is improved to split the kernel address on demand.

Not happening.  The pages to be split might be critical to fault
handling, e.g. stack, GDT, IDT, etc.

How much performance do we get back if we add a requirement that only
2M pages (hugetlbfs, etc) may be used for private guest memory?