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From: Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com>
To: Jim Mattson <jmattson@google.com>
Cc: kvm list <kvm@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: What's with all of the hardcoded instruction lengths in svm.c?
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2019 15:55:12 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87d0jhegjj.fsf@vitty.brq.redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CALMp9eQ4k71ox=0xQKM+CfOkFe6Vqp+0znJ3Ju4ZmyL9fgjm=w@mail.gmail.com>

Jim Mattson <jmattson@google.com> writes:

> Take the following code in rdmsr_interception, for example.
>
> svm->next_rip = kvm_rip_read(&svm->vcpu) + 2;
>
> Yes, the canonical rdmsr instruction is two bytes. However, there is
> nothing in the architectural specification prohibiting useless or
> redundant prefixes. So, for instance, 65 66 67 67 67 0f 32 is a
> perfectly valid 7-byte rdmsr instruction.

(I don't know much about why this was added but nobody else commented
so in case I'm not terribly mistaken):

This looks ugly, it is likely an over-optimization: we seem to only
advance svm->next_rip to be able to avoid doing
kvm_emulate_instruction() in skip_emulated_instruction(). With NRIP_SAVE
feature (appeared long ago) we don't use the advanced value as we
already know the next RIP:

	if (svm->vmcb->control.next_rip != 0) {
		WARN_ON_ONCE(!static_cpu_has(X86_FEATURE_NRIPS));
		svm->next_rip = svm->vmcb->control.next_rip;
	}

IMO, always doing kvm_emulate_instruction(vcpu, EMULTYPE_SKIP) in !NRIPS
case would be the correct way. I tried throwing away these advancements
and nothing broke, with and without NRIPS.

I can try sending a patch removing the manual advancement to see if
anyone has any objections.

-- 
Vitaly

  reply	other threads:[~2019-06-13 15:10 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-06-12 20:17 What's with all of the hardcoded instruction lengths in svm.c? Jim Mattson
2019-06-13 13:55 ` Vitaly Kuznetsov [this message]
2019-06-13 16:08   ` Jim Mattson
2019-06-14 17:01     ` Vitaly Kuznetsov

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