Re: [PATCH Part1 RFC v2 02/20] x86/sev: Save the negotiated GHCB version

[Brijesh Singh]

On 5/11/21 1:41 PM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 01:29:00PM -0500, Brijesh Singh wrote:
>> I ignored it, because I thought I still need to initialize the value to
>> zero because it does not go into .bss section which gets initialized to
>> zero by kernel on boot.
>>
>> I guess I was wrong, maybe compiler or kernel build ensures that
>> ghcb_version variable to be init'ed to zero because its marked static ?
> Yes.
>
> If in doubt, always look at the generated asm:
>
> make arch/x86/kernel/sev.s
>
> You can see the .zero 2 gas directive there, where the variable is
> defined.
>
>> In patch #4, you will see that I increase the GHCB max protocol version
>> to 2, and then min_t() will choose the lower value. I didn't combine
>> version bump and caching into same patch because I felt I will be asked
>> to break them into two logical patches.
> Hmm, what would be the reasoning to keep the version bump in a separate
> patch?

Version 2 of the spec adds bunch of NAEs, and several of them are
optional except the hyervisor features NAE. IMO, a guest should bump the
GHCB version only after it has implemented all the required NAEs from
the version 2. It may help during the git bisect of the guest kernel --
mainly when the hypervisor supports the higher version.