Abhinav Srivastava wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I am using Xen-3.2-testing (non-PAE and x86-32) on Intel's Core 2
> Quad processor. My HVM domain is Fedora i386 with Linux kernel 2.6.16
> (with 8K of stack and CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER = y).
>
> In my project, I am trying to perform stack walk on the HVM guest's
> kernel stack from the Xen hypervisor. In order to do that, whenever
> a VMEXIT happens, I get the ebp value from cpu_user_regs and try
> to use this address as a starting point for the walk. I add 4 bytes
> in this address (for return address ) and try to get the value at
> this location using Xen's function hvm_copy_from_guest_virt(), which
> reads 4 bytes of return address. I, then, do this process recursively
> by reading the value at the location pointed by the ebp to get the
> previous frame and so on.
>
> During the recursive process, sometimes when I try to get the
> return address or next frame address, hvm_copy_from_guest_virt() function
> crashes as it is not able to read that memory.
There are several reasons why you can run into trouble. The simplest reason is
that the guest may be running in user mode. Since you can't predict that state
of the stack in user mode, you should first check for guest kernel mode before
you try to trace the stack. The second issue is that for hvm guests, VMEXITs
may occur at arbitrary points in the guest kernel execution. This means that
you may find the guest kernel in the middle of handling an exception or
interrupt. In these situations, the stack layout will be different than you
expect. To avoid this, you may want to ignore stacks when interrupts are
disabled in the guest kernel. Note here that disabling interrupts in a guest
kernel doesn't prevent a VMEXIT.
> I saw a function named "show_guest_stack" in xen/arch/x86/traps.c,
> which does the stack walk incase of PV domain. And, returns if
> it finds HVM domain. Is there any function available for doing
> stack walk in HVM domain?
You may want to look at the crash utility (http://people.redhat.com/anderson/).
It knows how to dump kernel stacks from live systems or dump files. It is
also smart enough to properly recognize exception frames and properly trace
past them.
> If not, could you please let me know whether my stack walk
> procedure is correct or not? Or, do I need to do something different
> incase of an HVM domain? I tried using different methods of putting
> exit condition in my stack walk code such as frame-pointer = 0,
> return address = 0, Stack walk depth = 24, decreasing frame pointer and
> ebp should be less than guest's current thread_info + 8912.
Your starting and ending conditions are too simplistic to work in the case of
an arbitrary VMEXIT from an hvm domain. You need to handle every variation
possible with a linux kernel based stack tracer, and in addition, deal with
partially constructed/deconstructed exception frames.
Steve
> As of now, I am clueless as how to do this. Any help would be highly
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Abhinav
>
>
>
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