VMX: System lock-up in guest mode, BIOS under suspect

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

Hi,

for the past days I've been trying to understand a very strange hard
lock-up of some Intel i7 boxes when running our 16-bit guest OS under
KVM. After applying some instrumentation before and after the VM entry
(e.g. direct write to VGA memory), it turned out that the system is
apparently stuck inside guest mode!

I double-checked that VM exits on external IRQs and NMIs are properly
enabled in the VMCS - they are. I also tried to capture any potential
last words via serial console and even via remote DMA over Firewire) -
nothing. This likely means that not only the one core in guest mode is
stuck but all the others as well (note: the freeze is reproducible both
in UP and SMP mode). Very uncommon for an OS crash I would say...

So I decided to go for some nice conspiracy theory and put SMIs and
related BIOS code under suspect. Interestingly, this worked out:

After disabling all SMIs on my box (Fujitsu Celsius H700) via the
chipset register, the hard freezes no longer occurred up to now. My
customer was able to confirm this on some Lenovo Notebook as well. We
are currently collecting data about the affected systems to correlate
it, and we are performing longer test runs.

Nevertheless, I would like to collect some first comments on this. I'm
specifically wondering...

 - if there is anything the host OS can mess up to make VM exits crash
   on the way into SMM or out again (I cannot imagine as the SMM monitor
   should always be able to run, at least in the absence of CPU
   erratas).

 - what the SMM monitor could do wrong to cause such a crash,
   especially as it looks like the hardware does all the switching for
   it.

 - if there could still be some KVM crash around host<->guest switching
   that just happens to be triggered by the SMI noise and that affects
   the whole system (including cores that do not host KVM threads).

Any ideas warmly welcome!

Jan

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