Re: [RFC PATCH 8/8] kvm: gmem: Allow restricted userspace mappings

[David Hildenbrand]

On 10.07.24 11:51, Patrick Roy wrote:
> On 7/9/24 22:13, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you can confirm the sender and know the content is safe.
> >
> >
> >
> > On 09.07.24 16:48, Fuad Tabba wrote:
> > > Hi Patrick,
> > >
> > > On Tue, Jul 9, 2024 at 2:21 PM Patrick Roy <roypat@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > Allow mapping guest_memfd into userspace. Since AS_INACCESSIBLE is set
> > > > on the underlying address_space struct, no GUP of guest_memfd will be
> > > > possible.
> > >
> > > This patch allows mapping guest_memfd() unconditionally. Even if it's
> > > not guppable, there are other reasons why you wouldn't want to allow
> > > this. Maybe a config flag to gate it? e.g.,
> >
> >
> > As discussed with Jason, maybe not the direction we want to take with
> > guest_memfd.
> > If it's private memory, it shall not be mapped. Also not via magic
> > config options.
> >
> > We'll likely discuss some of that in the meeting MM tomorrow I guess
> > (having both shared and private memory in guest_memfd).
>
> Oh, nice. I'm assuming you mean this meeting:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/197a2f19-c71c-fbde-a62a-213dede1f4fd@xxxxxxxxxx/T/?
> Would it be okay if I also attend? I see it also mentions huge pages,
> which is another thing we are interested in, actually :)

Hi,

sorry for the late reply. Yes, you could have joined .... too late. 
There will be a summary posted soon. So far the agreement is that we're 
planning on allowing shared memory as part guest_memfd, and will allow 
that to get mapped and pinned. Private memory is not going to get mapped 
and pinned.

If we have to disallow pinning of shared memory on top for some use 
cases (i.e., no directmap), I assume that could be added.

> > Note that just from staring at this commit, I don't understand the
> > motivation *why* we would want to do that.
>
> Fair - I admittedly didn't get into that as much as I probably should
> have. In our usecase, we do not have anything that pKVM would (I think)
> call "guest-private" memory. I think our memory can be better described
> as guest-owned, but always shared with the VMM (e.g. userspace), but
> ideally never shared with the host kernel. This model lets us do a lot
> of simplifying assumptions: Things like I/O can be handled in userspace
> without the guest explicitly sharing I/O buffers (which is not exactly
> what we would want long-term anyway, as sharing in the guest_memfd
> context means sharing with the host kernel), we can easily do VM
> snapshotting without needing things like TDX's TDH.EXPORT.MEM APIs, etc.

Okay, so essentially you would want to use guest_memfd to only contain 
shard memory and disallow any pinning like for secretmem.

If so, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to simply add KVM support to 
consume *real* secretmem memory? IIRC so far there was only demand to 
probably remove the directmap of private memory in guest_memfd, not of 
shared memory.

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb