Re: [RFC PATCH v2 4/6] KVM: SVM: Save shadow stack host state on VMRUN

John Allen
2023-08-01T17:03:31Z

On Tue, Aug 01, 2023 at 09:28:11AM -0700, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 01, 2023, John Allen wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 02:11:46PM -0700, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > > On Wed, May 24, 2023, John Allen wrote:
> > > As for the values themselves, the kernel doesn't support Supervisor Shadow Stacks
> > > (SSS), so PL0-2_SSP are guaranteed to be zero. And if/when SSS support is added,
> > > I doubt the kernel will ever use PL1_SSP or PL2_SSP, so those can probably be
> > > ignored entirely, and PL0_SSP might be constant per task? In other words, I don't
> > > see any reason to try and track the host values for support that doesn't exist,
> > > just do what VMX does for BNDCFGS and yell if the MSRs are non-zero. Though for
> > > SSS it probably makes sense for KVM to refuse to load (KVM continues on for BNDCFGS
> > > because it's a pretty safe assumption that the kernel won't regain MPX supported).
> > >
> > > E.g. in rough pseudocode
> > >
> > > if (boot_cpu_has(X86_FEATURE_SHSTK)) {
> > > rdmsrl(MSR_IA32_PLx_SSP, host_plx_ssp);
> > >
> > > if (WARN_ON_ONCE(host_pl0_ssp || host_pl1_ssp || host_pl2_ssp))
> > > return -EIO;
> > > }
> >
> > The function in question returns void and wouldn't be able to return a
> > failure code to callers. We would have to rework this path in order to
> > fail in this way. Is it sufficient to just WARN_ON_ONCE here or is there
> > some other way we can cause KVM to fail to load here?
>
> Sorry, I should have been more explicit than "it probably make sense for KVM to
> refuse to load". The above would go somewhere in __kvm_x86_vendor_init().

I see, in that case that change should probably go up with:
"KVM:x86: Enable CET virtualization for VMX and advertise to userspace"
in Weijiang Yang's series with the rest of the changes to
__kvm_x86_vendor_init(). Though I can tack it on in my series if
needed.