Re: [PATCH 2/2] KVM: SVM: Emulate next_rip svm feature

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Wed Jul 28 2010 - 07:34:24 EST


On 07/28/2010 02:25 PM, Roedel, Joerg wrote:
On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 06:28:06AM -0400, Avi Kivity wrote:
We have a slightly different problem, if the nested guest manages to get
an instruction to be emulated by the host (if the guest assigned it the
cirrus framebuffer, for example, so from L1's point of view it is RAM,
but from L0's point of view it is emulated), then we miss the
intercept. L2 could take over L1 this way.
I wonder how this could happen. Shouldn't the shadow paging code take
care of this?


L1 thinks the memory is RAM, so it maps it directly and forgets about it. L0 knows it isn't, so it leaves it unmapped and emulates any instruction which accesses it. The emulator needs to check whether the instruction is intercepted or not.

Note, I think if the instruction operand is in mmio, we're safe, since the intercept has higher priority than memory access. But if the instruction itself is on mmio, or if we entered the emulator through smp trickery, then the emulator will execute the instruction in nested guest context.

--
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.

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