Re: [PATCH v12 09/14] x86/sgx: Implement async reclamation for cgroup

From: Haitao Huang
Date: Mon Apr 22 2024 - 12:18:12 EST


On Sun, 21 Apr 2024 19:22:27 -0500, Huang, Kai <kai.huang@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 2024-04-19 at 20:14 -0500, Haitao Huang wrote:
> > I think we can add support for "sgx_cgroup=disabled" in future if indeed
> > needed. But just for init failure, no?
> >
>
> It's not about the commandline, which we can add in the future when
> needed. It's about we need to have a way to handle SGX cgroup being
> disabled at boot time nicely, because we already have a case where we > need
> to do so.
>
> Your approach looks half-way to me, and is not future extendible. If we
> choose to do it, do it right -- that is, we need a way to disable it
> completely in both kernel and userspace so that userspace won't be able> to
> see it.

That would need more changes in misc cgroup implementation to support sgx-disable. Right now misc does not have separate files for different resource types. So we can only block echo "sgx_epc..." to those interfacefiles, can't really make files not visible.

"won't be able to see" I mean "only for SGX EPC resource", but not the
control files for the entire MISC cgroup.

I replied at the beginning of the previous reply:

"
Given SGX EPC is just one type of MISC cgroup resources, we cannot just
disable MISC cgroup as a whole.
"

Sorry I missed this point. below.

You just need to set the SGX EPC "capacity" to 0 to disable SGX EPC. See
the comment of @misc_res_capacity:

* Miscellaneous resources capacity for the entire machine. 0 capacity
* means resource is not initialized or not present in the host.


IIUC I don't think the situation we have is either of those cases. For our case, resource is inited and present on the host but we have allocation error for sgx cgroup infra.

And "blocking echo sgx_epc ... to those control files" is already
sufficient for the purpose of not exposing SGX EPC to userspace, correct?

E.g., if SGX cgroup is enabled, you can see below when you read "max":

# cat /sys/fs/cgroup/my_group/misc.max
# <resource1> <max1>
sgx_epc ...
...

Otherwise you won't be able to see "sgx_epc":

# cat /sys/fs/cgroup/my_group/misc.max
# <resource1> <max1>
...

And when you try to write the "max" for "sgx_epc", you will hit error:

# echo "sgx_epc 100" > /sys/fs/cgroup/my_group/misc.max
# ... echo: write error: Invalid argument

The above applies to all the control files. To me this is pretty much
means "SGX EPC is disabled" or "not supported" for userspace.

You are right, capacity == 0 does block echoing max and users see an error if they do that. But 1) doubt you literately wanted "SGX EPC is disabled" and make it unsupported in this case, 2) even if we accept this is "sgx cgroup disabled" I don't see how it is much better user experience than current solution or really helps user better.

Also to implement this approach, as you mentioned, we need workaround the fact that misc_try_charge() fails when capacity set to zero, and adding code to return root always? So it seems like more workaround code to just make it work for a failing case no one really care much and end result is not really much better IMHO.

Thanks
Haitao