Re: [PATCH v3 00/17] KVM: x86/pmu: Add support to enable Guest PEBS via DS

Xu, Like
2021-01-26T03:04:29Z

On 2021/1/25 20:18, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 08:07:06PM +0800, Xu, Like wrote:
>
>> So under the premise that counter cross-mapping is allowed,
>> how can hypercall help fix it ?
> Hypercall or otherwise exposing the mapping, will let the guest fix it
> up when it already touches the data. Which avoids the host from having
> to access the guest memory and is faster, no?
- as you may know, the mapping table is changing rapidly from
the time records to be rewritten to the time records to be read;

- the patches will modify the records before it is notified via PMI
which means it's transparent to normal guests (including Windows);

- a malicious guest would ignore the exposed mapping and the
hypercall and I don't think it can solve the leakage issue at all;

- make the guest aware of that hypercall or mapping requires more code changes
in the guest side; but now we can make it on the KVM side and we also know that
cross-mapping case rarely happens, and the overhead is acceptable based on
our tests;

Please let me know if you or Sean are not going to
buy in the PEBS records rewrite proposal in the patch 13 - 17.

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thx,likexu