[PATCH 8/9] Documentation: virt: Protected virtual machine dumps

Janosch Frank
2022-04-28T13:05:50Z

Let's add a documentation file which describes the dump process. Since
we only copy the UV dump data from the UV to userspace we'll not go
into detail here and let the party which processes the data describe
its structure.

Signed-off-by: Janosch Frank <frankja@linux.ibm.com>
---
Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst | 1 +
Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst | 60 ++++++++++++++++++++
2 files changed, 61 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst

diff --git a/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst b/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst
index 605f488f0cc5..44ec9ab14b59 100644
--- a/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/index.rst
@@ -10,3 +10,4 @@ KVM for s390 systems
s390-diag
s390-pv
s390-pv-boot
+ s390-pv-dump
diff --git a/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst b/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..6fe7560e10b1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/virt/kvm/s390/s390-pv-dump.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+===========================================
+s390 (IBM Z) Protected Virtualization dumps
+===========================================
+
+Summary
+-------
+
+Dumping a VM is an essential tool for debugging problems inside
+it. This is especially true when a protected VM runs into trouble as
+there's no way to access its memory and registers from the outside
+while it's running.
+
+However when dumping a protected VM we need to maintain its
+confidentiality until the dump is in the hands of the VM owner who
+should be the only one capable of analysing it.
+
+The confidentiality of the VM dump is ensured by the Ultravisor who
+provides an interface to KVM over which encrypted CPU and memory data
+can be requested. The encryption is based on the Customer
+Communication Key which is the key that's used to encrypt VM data in a
+way that the customer is able to decrypt.
+
+
+Dump process
+------------
+
+A dump is done in 3 steps:
+
+Initiation
+This step initializes the dump process, generates cryptographic seeds
+and extracts dump keys with which the VM dump data will be encrypted.
+
+Data gathering
+Currently there are two types of data that can be gathered from a VM:
+the memory and the vcpu state.
+
+The vcpu state contains all the important registers, general, floating
+point, vector, control and tod/timers of a vcpu. The vcpu dump can
+contain incomplete data if a vcpu is dumped while an instruction is
+emulated with help of the hypervisor. This is indicated by a flag bit
+in the dump data. For the same reason it is very important to not only
+write out the encrypted vcpu state, but also the unencrypted state
+from the hypervisor.
+
+The memory state is further divided into the encrypted memory and its
+encryption tweaks / status flags. The encrypted memory can simply be
+read once it has been exported. The time of the export does not matter
+as no re-encryption is needed. Memory that has been swapped out and
+hence was exported can be read from the swap and written to the dump
+target without need for any special actions.
+
+The tweaks / status flags for the exported pages need to be requested
+from the Ultravisor.
+
+Finalization
+The finalization step will provide the data needed to be able to
+decrypt the vcpu and memory data and end the dump process. When this
+step completes successfully a new dump initiation can be started.
--
2.32.0