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 13:22, Alex Bennée wrote:
>> Andrew Cooper <Andrew.Cooper3@citrix.com> writes:
>> 
>>> On 24/08/2022 10:19, 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.
>> As I understand it the MMAPBATCH ioctl is being treated like every
>> other
>> hypercall proxy through the ioctl interface. Which makes sense from the
>> point of view of having a consistent interface to the hypervisor but not
>> from point of view of providing a consistent userspace interface for
>> mapping memory which doesn't care about the hypervisor details.
>> The privcmd_mmapbatch_v2 interface is slightly richer than what you
>> could expose via mmap() because it allows the handling of partial
>> mappings with what I presume is a per-page *err array. If you issued the
>> hypercall directly from the mmap() and one of the pages wasn't mapped by
>> the hypervisor you would have to unwind everything before returning
>> EFAULT to the user.
>> 
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> For instance, in our case, where we are looking to create
>>>> hypervisor-agnostic virtio backends, the rust-vmm library [1] issues
>>>> mmap() only and expects it to work. It doesn't know it is running on a
>>>> Xen system, and it shouldn't know that as well.
>>>
>>> Use /dev/xen/hypercall which has a sane ABI for getting "safe" memory.
>>> privcmd is very much not sane.
>>>
>>> In practice you'll need to use both.  /dev/xen/hypercall for getting
>>> "safe" memory, and /dev/xen/privcmd for issuing hypercalls for now.
>> I'm unsure what is meant by safe memory here. privcmd_buf_mmap()
>> looks
>> like it just allocates a bunch of GFP_KERNEL pages rather than
>> interacting with the hypervisor directly. Are these the same pages that
>> get used when you eventually call privcmd_ioctl_mmap_batch()?
>
> privcmd_buf_mmap() is allocating kernel pages which are used for data being
> accessed by the hypervisor when doing the hypercall later. This is a generic
> interface being used for all hypercalls, not only for
> privcmd_ioctl_mmap_batch().
>
>> The fact that /dev/xen/hypercall is specified by xen_privcmdbuf_dev is a
>> little confusing TBH.
>> Anyway the goal here is to provide a non-xen aware userspace with
>> standard userspace API to access the guests memory. Perhaps messing
>
> This is what the Xen related libraries are meant for. Your decision to
> ignore those is firing back now.

We didn't ignore them - the initial version of the xen-vhost-master
binary was built with the rust and linking to the Xen libraries. We are
however in the process of moving to more pure rust (with the xen-sys
crate being a pure rust ioctl/hypercall wrapper).

However I was under the impression there where two classes of
hypercalls. ABI stable ones which won't change (which is all we are
planning to implement for xen-sys) and non-stable ABIs which would need
mediating by the xen libs. We are hoping we can do all of VirtIO with
just the stable ABI.

>> around with the semantics of the /dev/xen/[hypercall|privcmd] devices
>> nodes is too confusing.
>> Maybe we could instead:
>>   1. Have the Xen aware VMM ask to make the guests memory visible to
>> the
>>      host kernels address space.
>
> Urgh. This would be a major breach of the Xen security concept.
>
>>   2. When this is done explicitly create a device node to represent it (/dev/xen/dom-%d-mem?)
>>   3. Pass this new device to the non-Xen aware userspace which uses the
>>      standard mmap() call to make the kernel pages visible to userspace
>> Does that make sense?
>
> Maybe from your point of view, but not from the Xen architectural point
> of view IMHO. You are removing basically the main security advantages of
> Xen by generating a kernel interface for mapping arbitrary guest memory
> easily.

We are not talking about doing an end-run around the Xen architecture.
The guest still has to instruct the hypervisor to grant access to its
memory. Currently this is a global thing (i.e. whole address space or
nothing) but obviously more fine grained grants can be done on a
transaction by transaction basis although we are exploring more
efficient mechanisms for this (shared pools and carve outs).

This does raise questions for the mmap interface though - each
individually granted region would need to be mapped into the dom0
userspace virtual address space or perhaps a new flag for mmap() so we
can map the whole address space but expect SIGBUS faults if we access
something that hasn't been granted.

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


-- 
Alex Bennée