Re: [PATCH] mce: use safe MSR accesses

From: Joel Schopp
Date: Thu Mar 12 2015 - 13:20:42 EST




On 03/11/2015 05:47 PM, Luck, Tony wrote:
>> When running as a guest under kvm, it's possible that the MSR
>> being accessed may not be implemented. All MSR accesses should
>> be prepared to handle exceptions.
> Isn't that a KVM bug? The code here first checks family/model before accessing the MSR:
>
> if (c->x86 == 0x15 &&
> (c->x86_model >= 0x10 && c->x86_model <= 0x1f)) {
>
> If kvm tells the guest that it is running on one of these models, shouldn't it provide
> complete coverage for that model?
These MSRs don't make sense in guest mode. The real question is if we
fix that in KVM, here, or both. I'm a fan of fixing it in both places.
Xen's behavior is to return a value of 0 if the guest tries to access
these, that seems like a reasonable thing to do in KVM as well. I am
volunteering myself to write that patch for KVM, but I would encourage
accepting an updated version of this patch as well.
>
> If that isn't possible - then you should still do more than just s/rdmsrl/rdmsrl_safe/ ... like
> check the return value to see whether you got an exception .. and thus should skip past
> code that uses the "val" that you thought you read from the non-existent MSR.
Initializing val to 0 where it is declared should have the desired effect.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/