Re: [RFC 00/16] KVM protected memory extension

Mike Rapoport
2020-05-26T06:17:37Z

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 04:47:18PM +0300, Liran Alon wrote:
>
> On 22/05/2020 15:51, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
>
> Furthermore, I would like to point out that just unmapping guest data from
> kernel direct-map is not sufficient to prevent all
> guest-to-guest info-leaks via a kernel memory info-leak vulnerability. This
> is because host kernel VA space have other regions
> which contains guest sensitive data. For example, KVM per-vCPU struct (which
> holds vCPU state) is allocated on slab and therefore
> still leakable.

Objects allocated from slab use the direct map, vmalloc() is another story.

> > - Touching direct mapping leads to fragmentation. We need to be able to
> > recover from it. I have a buggy patch that aims at recovering 2M/1G page.
> > It has to be fixed and tested properly
>
> As I've mentioned above, not mapping all guest memory from 1GB hugetlbfs
> will lead to holes in kernel direct-map which force it to not be mapped
> anymore as a series of 1GB huge-pages.
> This have non-trivial performance cost. Thus, I am not sure addressing this
> use-case is valuable.

Out of curiosity, do we actually have some numbers for the "non-trivial
performance cost"? For instance for KVM usecase?

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.