Re: [PATCH 1/6] KVM: guest_memfd: Add DEFAULT_SHARED flag, reject user page faults if not set

Vishal Annapurve
2025-10-01T14:23:07Z

On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 5:15 PM Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com> wrote:
>
> Oh! This got me looking at kvm_arch_supports_gmem_mmap() and thus
> KVM_CAP_GUEST_MEMFD_MMAP. Two things:
>
> 1. We should change KVM_CAP_GUEST_MEMFD_MMAP into KVM_CAP_GUEST_MEMFD_FLAGS so
> that we don't need to add a capability every time a new flag comes along,
> and so that userspace can gather all flags in a single ioctl. If gmem ever
> supports more than 32 flags, we'll need KVM_CAP_GUEST_MEMFD_FLAGS2, but
> that's a non-issue relatively speaking.
>

Guest_memfd capabilities don't necessarily translate into flags, so ideally:
1) There should be two caps, KVM_CAP_GUEST_MEMFD_FLAGS and
KVM_CAP_GUEST_MEMFD_CAPS.
2) IMO they should both support namespace of 64 values at least from the get go.
3) The reservation scheme for upstream should ideally be LSB's first
for the new caps/flags.

guest_memfd will achieve multiple features in future, both upstream
and in out-of-tree versions to deploy features before they make their
way upstream. Generally the scheme followed by out-of-tree versions is
to define a custom UAPI that won't conflict with upstream UAPIs in
near future. Having a namespace of 32 values gives little space to
avoid the conflict, e.g. features like hugetlb support will have to
eat up at least 5 bits from the flags [1].

[1] https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.17/source/include/uapi/asm-generic/hugetlb_encode.h#L20