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* [PATCH 0/2] KVM: nVMX: Bug fix for consuming stale vmcs02.GUEST_CR3
@ 2019-09-26 21:43 Sean Christopherson
  2019-09-26 21:43 ` [PATCH 1/2] KVM: nVMX: Always write vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 during nested VM-Enter Sean Christopherson
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 13+ messages in thread
From: Sean Christopherson @ 2019-09-26 21:43 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paolo Bonzini, Radim Krčmář
  Cc: Sean Christopherson, Vitaly Kuznetsov, Wanpeng Li, Jim Mattson,
	Joerg Roedel, kvm, linux-kernel, Reto Buerki

Reto Buerki reported a failure in a nested VMM when running with HLT
interception disabled in L1.  When putting L2 into HLT, KVM never actually
enters L2 and instead cancels the nested run and pretends that VM-Enter to
L2 completed and then exited on HLT (which KVM intercepted).  Because KVM
never actually runs L2, KVM skips the pending MMU update for L2 and so
leaves a stale value in vmcs02.GUEST_CR3.  If the next wake event for L2
triggers a nested VM-Exit, KVM will refresh vmcs12->guest_cr3 from
vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 and consume the stale value.

Fix the issue by unconditionally writing vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 during nested
VM-Enter instead of deferring the update to vmx_set_cr3(), and skip the
update of GUEST_CR3 in vmx_set_cr3() when running L2.  I.e. make the
nested code fully responsible for vmcs02.GUEST_CR3.

I really wanted to go with a different fix of handling this as a one-off
case in the HLT flow (in nested_vmx_run()), and then following that up
with a cleanup of VMX's CR3 handling, e.g. to do proper dirty tracking
instead of having the nested code do manual VMREADs and VMWRITEs.  I even
went so far as to hide vcpu->arch.cr3 (put CR3 in vcpu->arch.regs), but
things went south when I started working through the dirty tracking logic.

Because EPT can be enabled *without* unrestricted guest, enabling EPT
doesn't always mean GUEST_CR3 really is the guest CR3 (unlike SVM's NPT).
And because the unrestricted guest handling of GUEST_CR3 is dependent on
whether the guest has paging enabled, VMX can't even do a clean handoff
based on unrestricted guest.  In a nutshell, dynamically handling the
transitions of GUEST_CR3 ownership in VMX is a nightmare, so fixing this
purely within the context of nested VMX turned out to be the cleanest fix.

Sean Christopherson (2):
  KVM: nVMX: Always write vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 during nested VM-Enter
  KVM: VMX: Skip GUEST_CR3 VMREAD+VMWRITE if the VMCS is up-to-date

 arch/x86/kvm/vmx/nested.c |  8 ++++++++
 arch/x86/kvm/vmx/vmx.c    | 15 ++++++++++-----
 2 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

-- 
2.22.0


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 13+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2019-09-27 15:02 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2019-09-26 21:43 [PATCH 0/2] KVM: nVMX: Bug fix for consuming stale vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 Sean Christopherson
2019-09-26 21:43 ` [PATCH 1/2] KVM: nVMX: Always write vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 during nested VM-Enter Sean Christopherson
2019-09-26 23:39   ` Jim Mattson
2019-09-27 14:22     ` Sean Christopherson
2019-09-27  0:06   ` Liran Alon
2019-09-27 14:27     ` Sean Christopherson
2019-09-27 14:44       ` Liran Alon
2019-09-27 15:02         ` Sean Christopherson
2019-09-26 21:43 ` [PATCH 2/2] KVM: VMX: Skip GUEST_CR3 VMREAD+VMWRITE if the VMCS is up-to-date Sean Christopherson
2019-09-27 12:11   ` Vitaly Kuznetsov
2019-09-27 14:24     ` Sean Christopherson
2019-09-27  7:45 ` [PATCH 0/2] KVM: nVMX: Bug fix for consuming stale vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 Reto Buerki
2019-09-27 12:12 ` Vitaly Kuznetsov

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