Re: [RFC PATCH v5 0/5] vfio-pci: Add support for mmapping MSI-X table

Robin Murphy
2017-08-14T13:12:41Z

On 14/08/17 10:45, Alexey Kardashevskiy wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Is there anything to change besides those compiler errors and David's
> comment in 5/5? Or the while patchset is too bad? Thanks.

While I now understand it's not the low-level thing I first thought it
was, so my reasoning has changed, personally I don't like this approach
any more than the previous one - it still smells of abusing external
APIs to pass information from one part of VFIO to another (and it has
the same conceptual problem of attributing something to interrupt
sources that is actually a property of the interrupt target).

Taking a step back, though, why does vfio-pci perform this check in the
first place? If a malicious guest already has control of a device, any
kind of interrupt spoofing it could do by fiddling with the MSI-X
message address/data it could simply do with a DMA write anyway, so the
security argument doesn't stand up in general (sure, not all PCIe
devices may be capable of arbitrary DMA, but that seems like more of a
tenuous security-by-obscurity angle to me). Besides, with Type1 IOMMU
the fact that we've let a device be assigned at all means that this is
already a non-issue (because either the hardware provides isolation or
the user has explicitly accepted the consequences of an unsafe
configuration) - from patch #4 that's apparently the same for SPAPR TCE,
in which case it seems this flag doesn't even need to be propagated and
could simply be assumed always.

On the other hand, if the check is not so much to mitigate malicious
guests attacking the system as to prevent dumb guests breaking
themselves (e.g. if some or all of the MSI-X capability is actually
emulated), then allowing things to sometimes go wrong on the grounds of
an irrelevant hardware feature doesn't seem correct :/

Robin.

> On 07/08/17 17:25, Alexey Kardashevskiy wrote:
>> This is a followup for "[PATCH kernel v4 0/6] vfio-pci: Add support for mmapping MSI-X table"
>> http://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm/msg152232.html
>>
>> This time it is using "caps" in IOMMU groups. The main question is if PCI
>> bus flags or IOMMU domains are still better (and which one).
>
>>
>>
>>
>> Here is some background:
>>
>> Current vfio-pci implementation disallows to mmap the page
>> containing MSI-X table in case that users can write directly
>> to MSI-X table and generate an incorrect MSIs.
>>
>> However, this will cause some performance issue when there
>> are some critical device registers in the same page as the
>> MSI-X table. We have to handle the mmio access to these
>> registers in QEMU emulation rather than in guest.
>>
>> To solve this issue, this series allows to expose MSI-X table
>> to userspace when hardware enables the capability of interrupt
>> remapping which can ensure that a given PCI device can only
>> shoot the MSIs assigned for it. And we introduce a new bus_flags
>> PCI_BUS_FLAGS_MSI_REMAP to test this capability on PCI side
>> for different archs.
>>
>>
>> This is based on sha1
>> 26c5cebfdb6c "Merge branch 'parisc-4.13-4' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/deller/parisc-linux"
>>
>> Please comment. Thanks.
>>
>> Changelog:
>>
>> v5:
>> * redid the whole thing via so-called IOMMU group capabilities
>>
>> v4:
>> * rebased on recent upstream
>> * got all 6 patches from v2 (v3 was missing some)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Alexey Kardashevskiy (5):
>> iommu: Add capabilities to a group
>> iommu: Set IOMMU_GROUP_CAP_ISOLATE_MSIX if MSI controller enables IRQ
>> remapping
>> iommu/intel/amd: Set IOMMU_GROUP_CAP_ISOLATE_MSIX if IRQ remapping is
>> enabled
>> powerpc/iommu: Set IOMMU_GROUP_CAP_ISOLATE_MSIX
>> vfio-pci: Allow to expose MSI-X table to userspace when safe
>>
>> include/linux/iommu.h | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
>> include/linux/vfio.h | 1 +
>> arch/powerpc/kernel/iommu.c | 1 +
>> drivers/iommu/amd_iommu.c | 3 +++
>> drivers/iommu/intel-iommu.c | 3 +++
>> drivers/iommu/iommu.c | 35 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>> drivers/vfio/pci/vfio_pci.c | 20 +++++++++++++++++---
>> drivers/vfio/pci/vfio_pci_rdwr.c | 5 ++++-
>> drivers/vfio/vfio.c | 15 +++++++++++++++
>> 9 files changed, 99 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>>
>
>