Re: [PATCH Part2 v5 21/45] KVM: SVM: Make AVIC backing, VMSA and VMCB memory allocation SNP safe

Brijesh Singh
2021-09-23T22:24:01Z

On 9/23/21 1:39 PM, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> * Brijesh Singh (brijesh.singh@amd.com) wrote:
>> On 9/22/21 1:55 PM, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
>>> * Brijesh Singh (brijesh.singh@amd.com) wrote:
>>>> Implement a workaround for an SNP erratum where the CPU will incorrectly
>>>> signal an RMP violation #PF if a hugepage (2mb or 1gb) collides with the
>>>> RMP entry of a VMCB, VMSA or AVIC backing page.
>>>>
>>>> When SEV-SNP is globally enabled, the CPU marks the VMCB, VMSA, and AVIC
>>>> backing pages as "in-use" in the RMP after a successful VMRUN. This is
>>>> done for _all_ VMs, not just SNP-Active VMs.
>>> Can you explain what 'globally enabled' means?
>> This means that SNP is enabled in  host SYSCFG_MSR.Snp=1. Once its
>> enabled then RMP checks are enforced.
>>
>>
>>> Or more specifically, can we trip this bug on public hardware that has
>>> the SNP enabled in the bios, but no SNP init in the host OS?
>> Enabling the SNP support on host is 3 step process:
>>
>> step1 (bios): reserve memory for the RMP table.
>>
>> step2 (host): initialize the RMP table memory, set the SYSCFG msr to
>> enable the SNP feature
>>
>> step3 (host): call the SNP_INIT to initialize the SNP firmware (this is
>> needed only if you ever plan to launch SNP guest from this host).
>>
>> The "SNP globally enabled" means the step 1 to 2. The RMP checks are
>> enforced as soon as step 2 is completed.
> So I think that means we don't need to backport this to older kernels
> that don't know about SNP but might run on SNP enabled hardware (1), since
> those kernels won't do step2.

Correct.

thanks