[virtio-dev] Re: [RFC] Upstreaming virtio-wayland (or an alternative)

[Boris Brezillon <boris.brezillon@collabora.com>]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2020 09:47:46 -0800
Zach Reizner <zachr@google.com> wrote:

> > Thats why I don't like the new virtio device idea much and would prefer
> > vhost being reused, either directly (#1) or via proxy (#2).
> 
> For crosvm's purposes, we are looking at ways to reduce vhost usage in
> order to reduce host kernel exposure to untrusted guest input,
> including from the guest kernel. That is why a non-vhost based
> solution would be prefered.

Okay, I didn't know you were avoiding vhost-based solutions to
reduce the attack surface.

> 
> > Any potential security hole should be considered IMHO, even if it's not
> > easily exploitable.
> 
> I second Boris's statement. In the age of Spectre-like exploits,
> keeping secrets from other processes should be considered riskier than
> using FDs to prove that a process can access a resource.
> 
> > We might be able to do that lazily if we add
> > ->virtio_fd_to_vfd()/->virtio_vfd_to_fd() hooks to the file_operations
> > struct, instead of expecting the subsystem to pro-actively create those
> > mappings (when those hooks are not implemented, that means the resource
> > backed by this FD can't be passed on a VSOCK).
> 
> virtio-wayland actually will handle passing arbitrary FDs back and
> forth, but it does have special handling for virtio-gpu dmabufs. For
> everything else, virtio-wayland will determine if the FD is
> readable/writable/mappable and will recreate a pipe/memfd on the other
> side to emulate the FD. For mappable FDs, this is limited host->guest
> passing because in practice this is used only by the compositor to
> send the keyboard mapping to clients. The pipes are needed for both
> host->guest and guest->host because they are used to request clipboard
> content. The only FDs that require special handling are ones where
> there already is a host-side FD corresponding to the guest side FD,
> such as the case of wayland socket connections or dmabufs.
> 
> As for the question of which solution to go for, I would suggest
> either 3 (dedicated virtio device) or combining features from
> virtio-wayland with virtio-gpu. I don't think extending vsock is a
> good idea because there's enough going on with virtio-wayland with
> respect to FD passing and emulation that a generic interface will be
> too opinionated.

Can you be more specific? What would be the limitations of such a
generic interface that would make it unusable for the virtio-wayland
use case?

> I like the combination with virtio-gpu because it
> already has two related but separate graphics concepts combined into
> one device (display and rendering), so wayland would feel right at
> home.

Except that, looking at the virtio-wayland code nothing in there looks
fundamentally wayland specific, or even display-server specific. Sure,
FD passing support is focused on what wayland needs (pipes, dmabuf FDs,
...), but I see nothing that would prevent making it generic enough to
pass other kind of resources if we ever need to.

> Because wayland benefits from allocation and sharing of
> virtio-gpu buffers, a virtio-gpu combo device simplifies access to
> those buffers, whereas the separate virtio devices as implemented in
> crosvm requires bridging of resource handles (in guest kernel) and FDs
> (in crosvm).

I must admit I'm not a huge fan of integrating a protocol-agnostic
message passing interface (with FD-passing support) to virtio-gpu.
Sounds like something that could be re-used without virtio-gpu being
involved to me. As for the resource bridging thing, that's more or less
what I proposed with the generic interface to translate resource handles
(what I called VFDs) to local FDs. It would probably be easier with a
vhost-based solution, but your resource bridge interface in crosvm
seems to provide the same kind of abstraction. Any reason you want to
avoid this split?


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