[RFC PATCH v3 0/6] Direct Map Removal for guest_memfd

[Sean Christopherson]

+David Kaplan

On Thu, Oct 31, 2024, Derek Manwaring wrote:
> On 2024-10-31 at 10:42+0000 Patrick Roy wrote:
> > On Thu, 2024-10-31 at 09:50 +0000, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > > On 30.10.24 14:49, Patrick Roy wrote:
> > >> Most significantly, I've reduced the patch series to focus only on
> > >> direct map removal for guest_memfd for now, leaving the whole "how to do
> > >> non-CoCo VMs in guest_memfd" for later. If this separation is
> > >> acceptable, then I think I can drop the RFC tag in the next revision
> > >> (I've mainly kept it here because I'm not entirely sure what to do with
> > >> patches 3 and 4).
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > keeping upcoming "shared and private memory in guest_memfd" in mind, I
> > > assume the focus would be to only remove the direct map for private memory?
> > >
> > > So in the current upstream state, you would only be removing the direct
> > > map for private memory, currently translating to "encrypted"/"protected"
> > > memory that is inaccessible either way already.
> > >
> > > Correct?
> >
> > Yea, with the upcomming "shared and private" stuff, I would expect the
> > the shared<->private conversions would call the routines from patch 3 to
> > restore direct map entries on private->shared, and zap them on
> > shared->private.
> >
> > But as you said, the current upstream state has no notion of "shared"
> > memory in guest_memfd, so everything is private and thus everything is
> > direct map removed (although it is indeed already inaccessible anyway
> > for TDX and friends. That's what makes this patch series a bit awkward
> > :( )
> 
> TDX and SEV encryption happens between the core and main memory, so
> cached guest data we're most concerned about for transient execution
> attacks isn't necessarily inaccessible.
> 
> I'd be interested what Intel, AMD, and other folks think on this, but I
> think direct map removal is worthwhile for CoCo cases as well.

Removal of the direct map entries for guest private PFNs likely won't affect the
ability of an attacker to glean information from the unencrypted data that's in
the CPU caches, at least not on x86.  Both TDX and SEV steal physical address
bit(s) for tagging encrypted memory, and unless things have changed on recent
AMD microarchitectures (I'm 99.9% certain Intel CPUs haven't changed), those stolen
address bits are propagated into the caches.  I.e. the encrypted and unencrypted
forms of a given PFN are actually two different physical addresses under the hood.

I don't actually know how SEV uses the stolen PA bits though.  I don't see how it
simply be the ASID, because IIUC, AMD CPUs allow for more unique SEV-capable ASIDs
than uniquely addressable PAs by the number of stolen bits.  But I would be very
surprised if the tag for the cache isn't guaranteed to be unique per encryption key.

David?