Re: There is a null-ptr-deref bug in kvm_dirty_ring_get in virt/kvm/dirty_ring.c

From: Woodhouse, David
Date: Wed Nov 17 2021 - 04:46:38 EST


On Thu, 2021-10-21 at 22:08 +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 18/10/21 19:14, butt3rflyh4ck wrote:
> > {
> > struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu = kvm_get_running_vcpu(); //-------> invoke
> > kvm_get_running_vcpu() to get a vcpu.
> >
> > WARN_ON_ONCE(vcpu->kvm != kvm); [1]
> >
> > return &vcpu->dirty_ring;
> > }
> > ```
> > but we had not called KVM_CREATE_VCPU ioctl to create a kvm_vcpu so
> > vcpu is NULL.
>
> It's not just because there was no call to KVM_CREATE_VCPU; in general
> kvm->dirty_ring_size only works if all writes are associated to a
> specific vCPU, which is not the case for the one of
> kvm_xen_shared_info_init.
>
> David, what do you think? Making dirty-page ring buffer incompatible
> with Xen is ugly and I'd rather avoid it; taking the mutex for vcpu 0 is
> not an option because, as the reporter said, you might not have even
> created a vCPU yet when you call KVM_XEN_HVM_SET_ATTR. The remaining
> option would be just "do not mark the page as dirty if the ring buffer
> is active". This is feasible because userspace itself has passed the
> shared info gfn; but again, it's ugly...

I think I am coming to quite like that 'remaining option' as long as we
rephrase it as follows:

KVM does not mark the shared_info page as dirty, and userspace is
expected to *assume* that it is dirty at all times. It's used for
delivering event channel interrupts and the overhead of marking it
dirty each time is just pointless.

I've merged the patch I sent yesterday into my pfncache series because
I realised we needed the same there, but I'll look at making the Xen
code *not* mark the shinfo page dirty when it writes the clock data
there.



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