Re: [PATCHv7 00/14] mm, x86/cc: Implement support for unaccepted memory

Peter Gonda
2022-06-24T17:16:28Z

>> > Peter, is your enter key broken? You seem to be typing all your text in
>> > a single unreadable paragraph.

Sorry I will try to format better in the future.

>> > You're saying that firmware basically has two choices:
>> > 1. Accept all the memory up front and boot slowly, but reliably
>> > 2. Use thus "unaccepted memory" mechanism, boot fast, but risk that the
>> > VM loses a bunch of memory.

That's right. Given that the first round of SNP guest patches are in
but this work to support unaccepted memory for SNP is not we assume we
will have distros that support SNP without this "unaccepted memory"
feature.

On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 11:10 AM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/24/22 10:06, Marc Orr wrote:
> > I think Peter's point is a little more nuanced than that. Once lazy
> > accept goes into the guest firmware -- without the feature negotiation
> > that Peter is suggesting -- cloud providers now have a bookkeeping
> > problem. Which images have kernels that can boot from a guest firmware
> > that doesn't pre-validate all the guest memory?
>
> Hold on a sec though...
>
> Is this a matter of
>
> can boot from a guest firmware that doesn't pre-validate all the
> guest memory?
>
> or
>
> can boot from a guest firmware that doesn't pre-validate all the
> guest memory ... with access to all of that guest's RAM?
>
> In other words, are we talking about "fails to boot" or "can't see all
> the RAM"?
>

Yes, I'm sorry I was mistaken. If FW uses unaccepted memory but the
kernel doesn't support it the VM should still boot but will fail to
utilize all of its given RAM.

>> > If the customer screws up, they lose a bunch of the RAM they paid for.
>> > That seems like a rather self-correcting problem to me.

Providing customers with an easy to use product is a problem for us
the cloud provider, encoding foot-guns doesn't sound like what's best
for the user here. I wanted to bring this up here since it seems like
a problem most vendors/users of SNP and TDX would run into. We can of
course figure this out internally if no one else sees this as an
issue.