[PATCH] arm64: KVM: Take S1 walks into account when determining S2 write faults

Will Deacon will.deacon at arm.com
Mon Oct 17 03:20:22 PDT 2016


On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 09:14:32PM +0200, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 12:37:01PM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> > The WnR bit in the HSR/ESR_EL2 indicates whether a data abort was
> > generated by a read or a write instruction. For stage 2 data aborts
> > generated by a stage 1 translation table walk (i.e. the actual page
> > table access faults at EL2), the WnR bit therefore reports whether the
> > instruction generating the walk was a load or a store, *not* whether the
> > page table walker was reading or writing the entry.
> > 
> > For page tables marked as read-only at stage 2 (e.g. due to KSM merging
> > them with the tables from another guest), this could result in livelock,
> > where a page table walk generated by a load instruction attempts to
> > set the access flag in the stage 1 descriptor, but fails to trigger
> > CoW in the host since only a read fault is reported.
> > 
> > This patch modifies the arm64 kvm_vcpu_dabt_iswrite function to
> > take into account stage 2 faults in stage 1 walks. Since DBM cannot be
> > disabled at EL2 for CPUs that implement it, we assume that these faults
> > are always causes by writes, avoiding the livelock situation at the
> > expense of occasional, spurious CoWs.
> > 
> > We could, in theory, do a bit better by checking the guest TCR
> > configuration and inspecting the page table to see why the PTE faulted.
> > However, I doubt this is measurable in practice, and the threat of
> > livelock is real.
> > 
> > Cc: Marc Zyngier <marc.zyngier at arm.com>
> > Cc: Christoffer Dall <christoffer.dall at linaro.org>
> > Cc: Julien Grall <julien.grall at arm.com>
> > Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com>
> 
> Reviewed-by: Christoffer Dall <christoffer.dall at linaro.org>
> 
> Applied,

This doesn't seem to be in 4.9-rc1. Could you please dig it up?

Ta,

Will



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