Re: [PATCH RFC] KVM: x86: tell guests if the exposed SMT topology is trustworthy

Liran Alon
2019-11-05T17:33:32Z

> On 5 Nov 2019, at 19:17, Liran Alon <liran.alon@oracle.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On 5 Nov 2019, at 18:17, Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> Virtualized guests may pick a different strategy to mitigate hardware
>> vulnerabilities when it comes to hyper-threading: disable SMT completely,
>> use core scheduling, or, for example, opt in for STIBP. Making the
>> decision, however, requires an extra bit of information which is currently
>> missing: does the topology the guest see match hardware or if it is 'fake'
>> and two vCPUs which look like different cores from guest's perspective can
>> actually be scheduled on the same physical core. Disabling SMT or doing
>> core scheduling only makes sense when the topology is trustworthy.
>
> This is not only related to vulnerability mitigations.
> It’s also important for guest to know if it’s SMT topology is trustworthy for various optimisation algorithms.
> E.g. Should it attempt to run tasks that share memory on same NUMA node?
>
>>
>> Add two feature bits to KVM: KVM_FEATURE_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT with the meaning
>> that KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT bit answers the question if the exposed SMT
>> topology is actually trustworthy. It would, of course, be possible to get
>> away with a single bit (e.g. 'KVM_FEATURE_FAKE_SMT') and not lose backwards
>> compatibility but the current approach looks more straightforward.
>
> Agree.
>
>>
>> There were some offline discussions on whether this new feature bit should
>> be complemented with a 're-enlightenment' mechanism for live migration (so
>> it can change in guest's lifetime) but it doesn't seem to be very
>> practical: what a sane guest is supposed to do if it's told that SMT
>> topology is about to become fake other than kill itself? Also, it seems to
>> make little sense to do e.g. CPU pinning on the source but not on the
>> destination.
>
> Agree.
>
>>
>> There is also one additional piece of the information missing. A VM can be
>> sharing physical cores with other VMs (or other userspace tasks on the
>> host) so does KVM_FEATURE_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT imply that it's not the case or
>> not? It is unclear if this changes anything and can probably be left out
>> of scope (just don't do that).
>
> I don’t think KVM_FEATURE_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT should indicate to guest whether it’s vCPU shares a CPU core with another guest.
> It should only expose to guest the fact that he can rely on it’s virtual SMT topology. i.e. That there is a relation between virtual SMT topology
> to which physical logical processors run which vCPUs.
>
> Guest have nothing to do with the fact that he is now aware host doesn’t guarantee to him that one of it’s vCPU shares a CPU core with another guest vCPU.
> I don’t think we should have a CPUID bit that expose this information to guest.
>
>>
>> Similar to the already existent 'NoNonArchitecturalCoreSharing' Hyper-V
>> enlightenment, the default value of KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT is set to
>> !cpu_smt_possible(). KVM userspace is thus supposed to pass it to guest's
>> CPUIDs in case it is '1' (meaning no SMT on the host at all) or do some
>> extra work (like CPU pinning and exposing the correct topology) before
>> passing '1' to the guest.
>
> Hmm… I’m not sure this is correct.
> For example, it is possible to expose in virtual SMT topology that guest have 2 vCPUs running on single NUMA node,
> while in reality each vCPU task can be scheduled to run on different NUMA nodes. Therefore, making virtual SMT topology not trustworthy.
> i.e. Disabling SMT on host doesn’t mean that virtual SMT topology is reliable.
>
> I think this CPUID bit should just be set from userspace when admin have guaranteed to guest that it have set vCPU task affinity properly.
> Without KVM attempting to set this bit by itself.
>
> Note that we defined above KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT bit differently than “NoNonArchitecturalCoreSharing”.
> “NoNonArchitecturalCoreSharing” guarantees to guest that vCPUs of guest won’t share a physical CPU core unless they are defined as virtual SMT siblings.
> In contrast, KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT bit attempts to state that virtual SMT topology is a subset of how vCPUs are scheduled on physical SMT topology.
> i.e. It seems that Hyper-V bit is indeed only attempting to provide guest information related to security mitigations. While newly proposed KVM bit attempts to also
> assist guest to determine how to perform it’s internal scheduling decisions.
>
> -Liran

Oh I later saw below that you defined KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT indeed as Microsoft defined “NoNonArchitecturalCoreSharing”.
If you plan to go with this direction, than I suggest renaming to similar name as Hyper-V.
But I think having a general vSMT topology is trustworthy is also useful.
Maybe we should have separate bits for each.

-Liran

>
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com>
>> ---
>> Documentation/virt/kvm/cpuid.rst | 27 +++++++++++++++++++--------
>> arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm_para.h | 2 ++
>> arch/x86/kvm/cpuid.c | 7 ++++++-
>> 3 files changed, 27 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/Documentation/virt/kvm/cpuid.rst b/Documentation/virt/kvm/cpuid.rst
>> index 01b081f6e7ea..64b94103fc90 100644
>> --- a/Documentation/virt/kvm/cpuid.rst
>> +++ b/Documentation/virt/kvm/cpuid.rst
>> @@ -86,6 +86,10 @@ KVM_FEATURE_PV_SCHED_YIELD 13 guest checks this feature bit
>> before using paravirtualized
>> sched yield.
>>
>> +KVM_FEATURE_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT 14 set when host supports 'SMT
>> + topology is trustworthy' hint
>> + (KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT).
>> +
>> KVM_FEATURE_CLOCSOURCE_STABLE_BIT 24 host will warn if no guest-side
>> per-cpu warps are expeced in
>> kvmclock
>> @@ -97,11 +101,18 @@ KVM_FEATURE_CLOCSOURCE_STABLE_BIT 24 host will warn if no guest-side
>>
>> Where ``flag`` here is defined as below:
>>
>> -================== ============ =================================
>> -flag value meaning
>> -================== ============ =================================
>> -KVM_HINTS_REALTIME 0 guest checks this feature bit to
>> - determine that vCPUs are never
>> - preempted for an unlimited time
>> - allowing optimizations
>> -================== ============ =================================
>> +================================= =========== =================================
>> +flag value meaning
>> +================================= =========== =================================
>> +KVM_HINTS_REALTIME 0 guest checks this feature bit to
>> + determine that vCPUs are never
>> + preempted for an unlimited time
>> + allowing optimizations
>> +
>> +KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT 1 the bit is set when the exposed
>> + SMT topology is trustworthy, this
>> + means that two guest vCPUs will
>> + never share a physical core
>> + unless they are exposed as SMT
>> + threads.
>> +================================= =========== =================================
>> diff --git a/arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm_para.h b/arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm_para.h
>> index 2a8e0b6b9805..183239d5dfad 100644
>> --- a/arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm_para.h
>> +++ b/arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/kvm_para.h
>> @@ -31,8 +31,10 @@
>> #define KVM_FEATURE_PV_SEND_IPI 11
>> #define KVM_FEATURE_POLL_CONTROL 12
>> #define KVM_FEATURE_PV_SCHED_YIELD 13
>> +#define KVM_FEATURE_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT 14
>>
>> #define KVM_HINTS_REALTIME 0
>> +#define KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT 1
>>
>> /* The last 8 bits are used to indicate how to interpret the flags field
>> * in pvclock structure. If no bits are set, all flags are ignored.
>> diff --git a/arch/x86/kvm/cpuid.c b/arch/x86/kvm/cpuid.c
>> index f68c0c753c38..dab527a7081f 100644
>> --- a/arch/x86/kvm/cpuid.c
>> +++ b/arch/x86/kvm/cpuid.c
>> @@ -712,7 +712,8 @@ static inline int __do_cpuid_func(struct kvm_cpuid_entry2 *entry, u32 function,
>> (1 << KVM_FEATURE_ASYNC_PF_VMEXIT) |
>> (1 << KVM_FEATURE_PV_SEND_IPI) |
>> (1 << KVM_FEATURE_POLL_CONTROL) |
>> - (1 << KVM_FEATURE_PV_SCHED_YIELD);
>> + (1 << KVM_FEATURE_PV_SCHED_YIELD) |
>> + (1 << KVM_FEATURE_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT);
>>
>> if (sched_info_on())
>> entry->eax |= (1 << KVM_FEATURE_STEAL_TIME);
>> @@ -720,6 +721,10 @@ static inline int __do_cpuid_func(struct kvm_cpuid_entry2 *entry, u32 function,
>> entry->ebx = 0;
>> entry->ecx = 0;
>> entry->edx = 0;
>> +
>> + if (!cpu_smt_possible())
>> + entry->edx |= (1 << KVM_HINTS_TRUSTWORTHY_SMT);
>> +
>> break;
>> case 0x80000000:
>> entry->eax = min(entry->eax, 0x8000001f);
>> --
>> 2.20.1
>>
>