Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v3 10/10] x86/MSI-X: provide hypercall interface for mask-all control

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 11.06.15 at 11:51, <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 11/06/15 09:35, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> While I continue to be of the opinion that all direct writes to
>> interrupt masking bits (MSI-X mask-all, MSI-X per-entry mask,
>> MSI per entry mask) outside of the hypervisor are wrong and
>> should be eliminated, the scope of the problem now clearly
>> going beyond qemu made me reconsider whether we shouldn't,
>> as advocated by Stefano, follow the trap-and-emulate route
>> instead. This would not only mean adding code to x86's existing
>> port CF8/CFC intercepts, but also write-protecting the MMCFG
>> pages for all PCI devices being MSI or MSI-X capable, emulating
>> writes with inspection / modification of writes to any of the mask
>> bits located in PCI config space. (A subsequent optimization to
>> this may then be a hypercall to do config space writes,
>> eliminating the emulation overhead, accompanied by a bitmap
>> indicating which devices' CFG space can be written directly.)
>>
>> For a (from now on) timely resolution of the original problem I'd
>> really appreciate opinions (or alternative suggestions).
> 
> A very definite +1 from me.  I have previously suggested as much.

And now that I started looking into what it takes to make this
work, I'm having a deja vu: In order for us to reliably intercept
all CFG accesses, we need to whitelist the MMCFG pages of
devices we know we don't care about being written. I.e. we
need to start out with all of them being read-only. And the
affected MFNs have to be known before Dom0 maps these
pages (or else we would have to hunt down all the mappings in
the page tables, which is nothing I consider even remotely
reasonable). Yet, and here comes the deja vu, upstream Linux
_still_ doesn't make use of PHYSDEVOP_pci_mmcfg_reserved.
No idea whether FreeBSD or whatever else can be used as Dom0
do. So no matter how we turn it, we have a dependency on the
Dom0 kernel also being adjusted. In which case we might as well
go the original route of requiring hypercalls to be used for certain
operations to deal with the problem here.

Otoh the write interception has the potential of dealing with other
problems (like that of XSAs 120 and 126), but making the security
of Xen (in presence of the fix/workaround to the original problem
here) dependent on a Dom0 side change not even on its way into
the master Linux branch yet makes me really hesitant to try going
that route. (And no, I'm not up to fighting for another pv-ops hook
considering that I've never been really convinced of the pv-ops
model in the first place.)

But then again the one thing we might consider saving us on the
Linux side is that as of 2.6.25 base config space accesses don't
get done via MMCFG anymore, and we don't have an immediate
need to intercept extended ones (i.e. initially we might even get
away without snooping MMCFG writes at all). Roger - how do
things look like on the FreeBSD side?

Jan


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