Re: [PATCH 00/11] Alternate p2m: support multiple copies of host p2m

[Ed White <edmund.h.white@intel.com>]

On 01/14/2015 03:28 AM, Tamas K Lengyel wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 12:09 PM, Jan Beulich <JBeulich@suse.com> wrote:
>>>>> On 14.01.15 at 11:31, <tamas.lengyel@zentific.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 8:04 AM, Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Ed White <edmund.h.white@intel.com> 01/13/15 10:32 PM >>>
>>>>> On 01/13/2015 12:45 PM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>>>>>> On 13/01/15 20:02, Ed White wrote:
>>>>>>> The set of mfn's is the same, but I do allow gfn->mfn mappings to be
>>>>>>> modified under certain circumstances. One use of this is to point the
>>>>>>> same VA to different physical pages (with different access permissions)
>>>>>>> in different p2m's to hide memory changes.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What is the practical use of being able to play paging tricks like this
>>>>>> behind a VMs back?
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm restricted in how much detail I can go into on a public mailing list,
>>>>> but imagine that you want a data read to see one thing and an instruction
>>>>> fetch to see something else.
>>>>
>>>> How would that work? There can only be one P2M in use at a time, and that's
>>>> used for both translations. Or are you saying at least one of the two accesses
>>>> would be emulated nevertheless?
>>>
>>> I can see it working by having data fetch access to a page trapped via
>>> mem_access, while instruction fetch is not.
>>
>> Understood, but how do you then carry out the data access? The
>> question I raised was whether that would then involve emulation.
>>
>> Jan
> 
> At the mem_access trap point you can swap in an altp2m where the
> gfn->mfn mapping is the one where the breakpoints are hidden,
> singlestep, then swap the original p2m back. While this approach still
> has some overhead because of the use of singlestepping, it is going to
> be faster then what you currently have to do, which is removing all
> breakpoints, singlestep, then put breakpoints back. Now it would just
> be a matter of swapping a single pointer.
> 

Right. The key observation is that at any single point in time, a given
hardware thread can be fetching an instruction or reading data, but not
both. These patches add a low-overhead way of switching p2m's for a single
vcpu between any two such operations. There are ways of avoiding the
single-step too, although I don't think that falls within the scope
of this conversation.

Ed