Re: Understanding osdep_xenforeignmemory_map mmap behaviour

["Alex Bennée" <alex.bennee@linaro.org>]

Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> On 24.08.22 11:19, Viresh Kumar wrote:
>> On 24-03-22, 06:12, Juergen Gross wrote:
>>> For a rather long time we were using "normal" user pages for this purpose,
>>> which were just locked into memory for doing the hypercall.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately there have been very rare problems with that approach, as
>>> the Linux kernel can set a user page related PTE to invalid for short
>>> periods of time, which led to EFAULT in the hypervisor when trying to
>>> access the hypercall data.
>>>
>>> In Linux this can avoided only by using kernel memory, which is the
>>> reason why the hypercall buffers are allocated and mmap()-ed through the
>>> privcmd driver.
>> Hi Juergen,
>> I understand why we moved from user pages to kernel pages, but I
>> don't
>> fully understand why we need to make two separate calls to map the
>> guest memory, i.e. mmap() followed by ioctl(IOCTL_PRIVCMD_MMAPBATCH).
>> Why aren't we doing all of it from mmap() itself ? I hacked it up to
>> check on it and it works fine if we do it all from mmap() itself.
>
> Hypercall buffers are needed for more than just the "MMAPBATCH" hypercall.
> Or are you suggesting one device per possible hypercall?
>
>> Aren't we abusing the Linux userspace ABI here ? As standard userspace
>> code would expect just mmap() to be enough to map the memory. Yes, the
>> current user, Xen itself, is adapted to make two calls, but it breaks
>> as soon as we want to use something that relies on Linux userspace
>> ABI.
>
> I think you are still mixing up the hypercall buffers with the memory
> you want to map via the hypercall. At least the reference to kernel
> memory above is suggesting that.

Aren't the hypercall buffers all internal to the kernel/hypervisor
interface or are you talking about the ioctl contents?

>
>
> Juergen
>
> [2. OpenPGP public key --- application/pgp-keys; OpenPGP_0xB0DE9DD628BF132F.asc]...
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]


-- 
Alex Bennée