Re: [PATCH 11/11] KVM: arm64: Delegate support for SDEI to userspace

James Morse
2017-07-26T17:00:03Z

Hi Christoffer,

(looks like I forgot to send this ...)

On 06/06/17 20:58, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 06:43:59PM +0100, James Morse wrote:
>> The Software Delegated Exception Interface allows firmware to notify
>> the OS of system events by returning into registered handlers, even
>> if the OS has interrupts masked.
>>
>> While we could support this in KVM, we would need to expose an API for
>> the user space hypervisor to inject events, (and decide what to do it
>
> 'the user space hypervisor' ?

Qemu or kvmtool. I never know what generic term to use for these.
virtual-machine-monitor?

> s/it/if/
>
>> the event isn't registered or all the CPUs have SDE events masked). We
>> already have an API for guest 'hypercalls', so use this to push the
>> problem onto userspace.
>>
>> Advertise a new capability 'KVM_CAP_ARM_SDEI_1_0' and when any SDEI
>> call comes in, exit to userspace with exit_reason = KVM_EXIT_HYPERCALL.

> Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt says this is unused.
>
> We should add something there to say that this is now used for arm64,
> and the api doc also suggests that the hypercall struct in kvm_run has
> some meaningful data for this exit.

Yes, good point.

I was expecting this patch to provoke some wider discussion on how to delegate
SMCCC/HVC calls to user space. Do we want per-API KVM_CAP's, or one that dumps
the whole range on user-space when enabled. It came up (as a tangent) on another
thread:

Marc Zyngier wrote[0]:
> Eventually, we want to be able to handle the full spectrum of the SMCCC
> and forward things to an actual TEE if available. There is no real
> reason why PSCI shouldn't be handled in userspace the same way (and we
> already offload reset and halt to QEMU).

> Have we checked that the guest can't provoke QEMU to do something weird
> by causing this exit on arm64 currently (given that we always enable
> this handling of SDEI calls)?

Qemu 2.2.0 in ubuntu 15.04 ignores the 'sdei_version' hvc/hypercall-exit and
re-enters the guest with the registers unmodified. I think this is 'weird', I
assumed it would exit.

>> N.B. There is no enable/feature bit for SDEI exits as telling the guest
>> the interface exists via DT/ACPI should be sufficient.

I'm probably being too trusting here. Today an unknown HVC will cause KVM to
inject an undef, whereas with this change it might get handled by user-space if
the kernel recognises the range, and user-space might just skip the HVC and
carry on...

I will change this to support KVM_CAP_ENABLE_CAP_VM to enable the SDEI CAP and
pass that HVC range through to user-space using KVM_EXIT_HYPERCALL and
populating as much of that structure as makes sense...

>> diff --git a/virt/kvm/arm/arm.c b/virt/kvm/arm/arm.c
>> index 3a776ec99181..0bf2d923483c 100644
>> --- a/virt/kvm/arm/arm.c
>> +++ b/virt/kvm/arm/arm.c
>> @@ -206,8 +206,9 @@ int kvm_vm_ioctl_check_extension(struct kvm *kvm, long ext)
>> case KVM_CAP_READONLY_MEM:
>> case KVM_CAP_MP_STATE:
>> case KVM_CAP_IMMEDIATE_EXIT:
>> - r = 1;
>> - break;
>> +#ifdef CONFIG_ARM_SDE_INTERFACE
>> + case KVM_CAP_ARM_SDEI_1_0:
>> +#endif
>
> What's the point of conditionally supporting this based on the config
> option when the rest of the KVM functionality does not depend on the
> CONFIG_ARM_SDE_INTERFACE functionality?

You're right it doesn't depend on anything in KVM, but adding it unconditionally
here will enable it on 32bit too, and the spec says this is aarch64 only. So
#ifdef ARM64 would have been better.

> Could a user want to play with SDEI calls in a VM without the host
> having the proper support, or is that never relevant?

That works fine (its how it was developed!).

'Virtual machine monitors' should be able to pick a RAS notification method for
guests independently of what the host is using (if anything). If this doesn't
work it means we've accidentally created some ABI.

Thanks,

James

[0] http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2017-March/495861.html