Re: [PATCH v3 0/5] kvm "virtio pmem" device

Jan Kara
2019-01-10T10:17:57Z

On Thu 10-01-19 12:26:17, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2019 at 08:17:31PM +0530, Pankaj Gupta wrote:
> > This patch series has implementation for "virtio pmem".
> > "virtio pmem" is fake persistent memory(nvdimm) in guest
> > which allows to bypass the guest page cache. This also
> > implements a VIRTIO based asynchronous flush mechanism.
>
> Hmmmm. Sharing the host page cache direct into the guest VM. Sounds
> like a good idea, but.....
>
> This means the guest VM can now run timing attacks to observe host
> side page cache residency, and depending on the implementation I'm
> guessing that the guest will be able to control host side page
> cache eviction, too (e.g. via discard or hole punch operations).
>
> Which means this functionality looks to me like a new vector for
> information leakage into and out of the guest VM via guest
> controlled host page cache manipulation.
>
> https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.01161
>
> I might be wrong, but if I'm not we're going to have to be very
> careful about how guest VMs can access and manipulate host side
> resources like the page cache.....

Right. Thinking about this I would be more concerned about the fact that
guest can effectively pin amount of host's page cache upto size of the
device/file passed to guest as PMEM, can't it Pankaj? Or is there some QEMU
magic that avoids this?

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR