[Xen-devel] Re: One potential issue of shadow fault emulation

[Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

At 22:58 +0800 on 21 Dec (1198277929), Jiang, Yunhong wrote:
> Currently shadow fault handler try to emulate up to four extra
> instruction for PAE guest, to reduce vmexit times.
> 
> But there is a potential issue here: Consider the second instruction is
> a change to virtual TPR register. In physical environment, if the TPR
> acceleration is enabled, the cpu will try to access the
> VIRTUAL_APIC_PAGE_ADDR set in the VMCS. However, when we do emulation,
> we didn't cope with this situation, and will access the APIC_ACCESS_ADDR
> page pointed by the shadow. This is sure cause problem to guest, usually
> blue screen, and this issue will happen randomly depends on the content
> in the  apic access page.
> 
> So how should we cope with such situation? Stop emulation or, continue
> emulate , but access the virtual APIC page? Or any better idea?

We should stop emulation.  Probably nobody writes the TPR between the
two halves of a PTE write. :) 

Cheers,

Tim.

-- 
Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>
Principal Software Engineer, Citrix Systems.
[Company #5334508: XenSource UK Ltd, reg'd c/o EC2Y 5EB, UK.]

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