[PATCH 0/2] kvm: disable virtualization on kdump

[Avi Kivity]

Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> so reboots don't
>> work.  It also assigns some memory to the cpu; if the new kernel isn't aware of
>> it, 
>>     
>
> Not a problem for a kdump kernel, as it lives out of a reserved region
> of memory.
>   

But it is a problem for general kexec.

>>> Is it possible to disable vmx mode before we enable interrrupts in the
>>> kdump kernel?
>>>
>>>       
>> You need IPIs to disable vmx on smp.
>>     
>
> Thank you.  Reading your description and taking a quick look at
> the code in hardware disable it does not appear that there is
> anything needed (other than restricting ourselves it running
> uniprocessor in the kdump kernel) that needs to happen.
>
> Certainly it would be nice to have kvm disabled in hardware,
> but if you are proposing using the existing hardware disable
> I must say that the cure looks much worse than the disease.
>   

Certainly you don't want to issue IPIs when kdump()ing.  It's not 
unlikely that the other cpus have interrupts permanently disabled.

(we can use NMI IPIs, but that will likely be messy)

> It looks like the disable function is all of about 20 assembly
> instructions so I would not have a problem if he had a
> little inline function we could call that test to see if
> vmx is enabled and disable it in the case of kexec on panic.
>
> The normal polite shutdown.  That just looks like asking for trouble.
>   

But what happens when the kdump kernel reboots?  If it is uniprocessor, 
it will never have a chance to disable vmx on other cpus.  Using acpi 
reset (now default) works around this on some machines, but not all.

-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function