Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/18] virtio-blk: Support "VIRTIO_CONFIG_S_NEEDS_RESET"

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 10:37:00AM +0800, Fam Zheng wrote:
> On Mon, 04/20 19:36, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 03:59:15PM +0800, Fam Zheng wrote:
> > > Currently, virtio code chooses to kill QEMU if the guest passes any invalid
> > > data with vring.
> > > That has drawbacks such as losing unsaved data (e.g. when
> > > guest user is writing a very long email), or possible denial of service in
> > > a nested vm use case where virtio device is passed through.
> > > 
> > > virtio-1 has introduced a new status bit "NEEDS RESET" which could be used to
> > > improve this by communicating the error state between virtio devices and
> > > drivers. The device notifies guest upon setting the bit, then the guest driver
> > > should detect this bit and report to userspace, or recover the device by
> > > resetting it.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, virtio 1 spec does not have a conformance statement
> > that requires driver to recover. We merely have a non-normative looking
> > text:
> > 	Note: For example, the driver can’t assume requests in flight
> > 	will be completed if DEVICE_NEEDS_RESET is set, nor can it assume that
> > 	they have not been completed. A good implementation will try to recover
> > 	by issuing a reset.
> > 
> > Implementing this reset for all devices in a race-free manner might also
> > be far from trivial.  I think we'd need a feature bit for this.
> > OTOH as long as we make this a new feature, would an ability to
> > reset a single VQ be a better match for what you are trying to
> > achieve?
> 
> I think that is too complicated as a recovery measure, a device level resetting
> will be better to get to a deterministic state, at least.

Question would be, how hard is it to stop host from using all queues,
retrieve all host OS state and re-program it into the device.
If we need to shadow all OS state within the driver, then that's a lot
of not well tested code with a possibility of introducing more bugs.

> > 
> > > This series makes necessary changes in virtio core code, based on which
> > > virtio-blk is converted. Other devices now keep the existing behavior by
> > > passing in "error_abort". They will be converted in following series. The Linux
> > > driver part will also be worked on.
> > > 
> > > One concern with this behavior change is that it's now harder to notice the
> > > actual driver bug that caused the error, as the guest continues to run.  To
> > > address that, we could probably add a new error action option to virtio
> > > devices,  similar to the "read/write werror" in block layer, so the vm could be
> > > paused and the management will get an event in QMP like pvpanic.  This work can
> > > be done on top.
> > 
> > At the architectural level, that's only one concern. Others would be
> > - workloads such as openstack handle guest crash better than
> >   a guest that's e.g. slow because of a memory leak
> 
> What memory leak are you referring to?

That was just an example.  If host detects a malformed ring, it will
crash.  But often it doesn't, result is buffers not being used, so guest
can't free them up.

> > - it's easier for guests to probe host for security issues
> >   if guest isn't killed
> > - guest can flood host log with guest-triggered errors
> 
> We can still abort() if guest is triggering error too quickly.
> 
> Fam


Absolutely, and if it looked like I'm against error detection and
recovery, this was not my intent.

I am merely saying we can't apply this patchset as is, deferring
addressing the issues to patches on top.

But I have an idea: refactor the code to use error_abort. This way we
can apply the patchset without making functional changes, and you can
make progress to complete this, on top.



-- 
MST