Re: [PATCH 2/4] x86/P2M: relax guarding of MMIO entries

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>]

On 01.09.2021 10:50, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 05:38:49PM +0200, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 31.08.2021 17:25, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>>> On 31/08/2021 14:26, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 31.08.2021 15:16, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>>>>> On 30/08/2021 14:02, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>>>> Further permit "access" to differ in the "executable" attribute. While
>>>>>> ideally only ROM regions would get mapped with X set, getting there is
>>>>>> quite a bit of work. Therefore, as a temporary measure, permit X to
>>>>>> vary. For Dom0 the more permissive of the types will be used, while for
>>>>>> DomU it'll be the more restrictive one.
>>>>> Split behaviour between dom0 and domU based on types alone cannot
>>>>> possibly be correct.
>>>> True, but what do you do.
>>>>
>>>>> DomU's need to execute ROMs too, and this looks like will malfunction if
>>>>> a ROM ends up in the region that HVMLoader relocated RAM from.
>>>>>
>>>>> As this is a temporary bodge emergency bugfix, don't try to be clever -
>>>>> just take the latest access.
>>>> And how do we know that that's what is going to work?
>>>
>>> Because it's the pre-existing behaviour.
>>
>> Valid point. But for the DomU case there simply has not been any
>> pre-existing behavior. Hence my desire to be restrictive initially
>> there.
>>
>>>>  We should
>>>> strictly accumulate for Dom0. And what we do for DomU is moot for
>>>> the moment, until PCI passthrough becomes a thing for PVH. Hence
>>>> I've opted to be restrictive there - I'd rather see things break
>>>> (and getting adjusted) when this future work actually gets carried
>>>> out, than leave things permissive for no-one to notice that it's
>>>> too permissive, leading to an XSA.
>>>
>>> Restricting execute permissions is something unique to virt.  It doesn't
>>> exist in a non-virtualised system, as I and D side reads are
>>> indistinguishable outside of the core.
>>>
>>> Furthermore, it is inexpressible on some systems/configurations.
>>>
>>> Introspection is the only technology which should be restricting execute
>>> permissions in the p2m, and only when it takes responsibility for
>>> dealing with the fallout.
>>
>> IOW are you saying that the calls to set_identity_p2m_entry()
>> (pre-dating XSA-378) were wrong to use p2m_access_rw? Because that's
>> what's getting the way here.
> 
> I did wonder this before, because I saw some messages on a couple of
> systems about mappings override, and I'm not sure why we need to use
> p2m_access_rw. My first thought was to suggest to switch to use the
> default access type for the domain, like set_mmio_p2m_entry does.
> 
> I have to admit I'm not sure I see the point of preventing execution,
> but it's possible I'm missing something.

Well, what good can come from allowing execution from, say, the
IO-APIC or LAPIC pages? Or other MMIO-mapped register space? Insn
fetches might even trip bad hardware behavior in such a case by
being the wrong granularity. It's imo really only ROM space which
ought to have execution permitted.

The issue isn't just with execution, though, and as a result I may
need to change the logic here to also include at least W. As of
one of the XSA-378 changes we may now pass just p2m_access_r to
iommu_identity_mapping(), if the ACPI tables on an AMD system were
saying so. (We may also pass p2m_access_w, but I sincerely hope no
firmware would specify write but no read access.)

Similarly in "IOMMU/x86: restrict IO-APIC mappings for PV Dom0" I
now pass p2m_access_r to set_identity_p2m_entry().

I suppose an underlying issue is the mixed purpose of using
p2m_access_*, which possibly has been against the intentions in the
first place. We cannot, for example, express r/o access to an MMIO
page without using p2m_access_r (or p2m_access_rx), as there's no
suitable p2m type to express this via type alone. We may need to
split p2m_mmio_direct into multiple types (up to 7), I guess, if
we wanted to remove this (ab)use of p2m_access_*.

Jan