Re: [PATCH 00/15] s390x: Protected Virtualization support

[Janosch Frank <frankja@linux.ibm.com>]

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On 11/29/19 1:35 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 29, 2019 at 01:14:27PM +0100, Janosch Frank wrote:
>> On 11/29/19 12:08 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 06:43:19AM -0500, Janosch Frank wrote:
>>>> Most of the QEMU changes for PV are related to the new IPL type with
>>>> subcodes 8 - 10 and the execution of the necessary Ultravisor calls to
>>>> IPL secure guests. Note that we can only boot into secure mode from
>>>> normal mode, i.e. stfle 161 is not active in secure mode.
>>>>
>>>> The other changes related to data gathering for emulation and
>>>> disabling addressing checks in secure mode, as well as CPU resets.
>>>>
>>>> While working on this I sprinkled in some cleanups, as we sometimes
>>>> significantly increase line count of some functions and they got
>>>> unreadable.
>>>
>>> Can you give some guidance on how management applications including
>>> libvirt & layers above (oVirt, OpenStack, etc) would/should use this
>>> feature ?  What new command line / monitor calls are needed, and
>>> what feature restrictions are there on its use ?
>>
>> management applications generally do not need to know about this
>> feature. Most of the magic is in the guest image, which boots up in a
>> certain way to become a protected machine.
>>
>> The requirements for that to happen are:
>> * Machine/firmware support
>> * KVM & QEMU support
>> * IO only with iommu
>> * Guest needs to use IO bounce buffers
>> * A kernel image or a kernel on a disk that was prepared with special
>> tooling
> 
> If the user has a guest image that's expecting to run in protected
> machine mode, presumably this will fail to boot if run on a host
> which doesn't support this feature ?

Yes, the guest will lack stfle facility 161 and KVM will report a
specification exception on the diagnose subcode 8 - 10.

> 
> As a mgmt app I think there will be a need to be able to determine
> whether a host + QEMU combo is actually able to support protected
> machines. If the mgmt app is given an image and the users says it
> required protected mode, then the mgmt app needs to know which
> host(s) are able to run it.
> 
> Doing version number checks is not particularly desirable, so is
> there a way libvirt can determine if QEMU + host in general supports
> protected machines, so that we can report this feature to mgmt apps ?

I thought that would be visible via the cpu model by checking for the
unpack facility (161)?
Time for somebody else to explain that.


@Viktor @Boris: This one's for you.

> 
> 
> If a guest has booted & activated protected mode is there any way
> for libvirt to query that status ? This would allow the mgmt app
> to know that the guest is not going to be migratable thereafter.

Currently not

> 
> Is there any way to prevent a guest from using protected mode even
> if QEMU supports it ?  eg the mgmt app may want to be able to
> guarantee that all VMs are migratable, so don't want a guest OS
> secretly activating protected mode which blocks migration.

Not enabling facility 161 is enough.

> 
>> Such VMs are started like any other VM and run a short "normal" stub
>> that will prepare some things and then requests to be protected.
>>
>> Most of the restrictions are memory related and might be lifted in the
>> future:
>> * No paging
>> * No migration
> 
> Presumably QEMU is going to set a migration blocker when a guest
> activates protected mode ?

Well, that's stuff I still need to figure out :)

> 
>> * No huge page backings
>> * No collaborative memory management
> 
>> There are no monitor changes or cmd additions currently.
>> We're trying to insert protected VMs into the normal VM flow as much as
>> possible. You can even do a memory dump without any segfault or
>> protection exception for QEMU, however the guest's memory content will
>> be unreadable because it's encrypted.
> 
> Is there any way to securely acquire a key needed to interpret this,
> or is the memory dump completely useless ?

It's part of the design, but not yet implemented.

> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
> 



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