[PATCH 00/10] KVM: arm64: Adopt scoped resource management (guard) for EL1 and EL2

Fuad Tabba
2026-03-16T17:35:29Z

Hi everyone,

I stumbled upon a lock leak while reviewing Sebastien's recent GIC Hardening
series [1] on an early error path. It reminded me that we've run into this exact
kind of bug pretty often while working on pKVM. Since we're going to be
hopefully upstream even more pKVM code soon, I'd like to try and fix this
pattern once and for all.

This series refactors a good chunk of KVM/arm64 codebase—covering both the host
at EL1 and the hypervisor at EL2—to use the guard() and scoped_guard() macros
from <linux/cleanup.h>.

By tying our locks to the scope:
- We can safely use early returns (like return -EINVAL;) without accidentally
leaking locks.
- We can get rid of a lot of tangled goto exit labels.
- Reviewing patches gets a lot easier since we don't have to mentally track lock
states across giant functions.

A common concern with these RAII-style macros is that they might bloat the
generated assembly. However, looking at the compiled code, it actually does the
opposite. As an example, looking at the EL2 object file
arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/nvhe/pkvm.nvhe.o before and after this series:
- Instruction count: Dropped by 39 lines of assembly.
- .text segment size: Shrank by 166 bytes.

This happens because the compiler no longer has to generate dedicated branch
targets for exit blocks, nor the stack frame unwinding jumps just to call
hyp_spin_unlock. It just efficiently inlines the unlock instruction right where
the return happens.

The series is split into two parts:
- Patches 1-5 (EL2): Adds the DEFINE_LOCK_GUARD_1 wrapper for hyp_spinlock and
cleans up the nvhe/ directory.
- Patches 6-10 (EL1): Cleans up manual mutex_lock and spin_lock calls across the
standard KVM host code (mmu.c, arm.c, psci.c, reset.c, pkvm.c).

There are definitely other parts of the KVM codebase that could benefit from
this (especially the vGIC), but I'm stopping here for now to see what everyone
thinks of the approach before touching anything else.

Based on Linux 7.0-rc3.

Cheers,
/fuad

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CA+EHjTy051kjdReuESmk3HpMsBEW=s3DxhJXa8vQJFHz--wG2Q@mail.gmail.com/

To:

---
Fuad Tabba (10):
KVM: arm64: Add scoped resource management (guard) for hyp_spinlock
KVM: arm64: Use guard(hyp_spinlock) in page_alloc.c
KVM: arm64: Use guard(hyp_spinlock) in ffa.c
KVM: arm64: Use guard(hyp_spinlock) in mm.c
KVM: arm64: Use guard(hyp_spinlock) in pkvm.c
KVM: arm64: Use guard(mutex) in mmu.c
KVM: arm64: Use scoped resource management in arm.c
KVM: arm64: Use guard(spinlock) in psci.c
KVM: arm64: Use guard(spinlock) in reset.c
KVM: arm64: Use guard(mutex) in pkvm.c

arch/arm64/kvm/arm.c | 53 +++++--------
arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/include/nvhe/spinlock.h | 5 ++
arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/nvhe/ffa.c | 86 +++++++++-----------
arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/nvhe/mm.c | 37 +++------
arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/nvhe/page_alloc.c | 13 +--
arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/nvhe/pkvm.c | 122 ++++++++++++-----------------
arch/arm64/kvm/mmu.c | 95 +++++++++-------------
arch/arm64/kvm/pkvm.c | 19 ++---
arch/arm64/kvm/psci.c | 19 ++---
arch/arm64/kvm/reset.c | 8 +-
10 files changed, 182 insertions(+), 275 deletions(-)
---
base-commit: 1f318b96cc84d7c2ab792fcc0bfd42a7ca890681
change-id: 20260316-tabba-el2_guard-2f7e3fa06f69

Best regards,
--
Fuad Tabba <tabba@google.com>