Re: [PATCH 03/27] drm/i915/gvt: Incorporate KVM memslot info into check for 2MiB GTT entry

[Sean Christopherson]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2023, Yan Zhao wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 06, 2023 at 11:01:53PM +0000, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 06, 2023, Yan Zhao wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jan 05, 2023 at 05:40:32PM +0000, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Jan 05, 2023, Yan Zhao wrote:
> > > > I'm totally fine if KVMGT's ABI is that VFIO is the source of truth for mappings
> > > > and permissions, and that the only requirement for KVM memslots is that GTT page
> > > > tables need to be visible in KVM's memslots.  But if that's the ABI, then
> > > > intel_gvt_is_valid_gfn() should be probing VFIO, not KVM (commit cc753fbe1ac4
> > > > ("drm/i915/gvt: validate gfn before set shadow page entry").
> > > > 
> > > > In other words, pick either VFIO or KVM.  Checking that X is valid according to
> > > > KVM and then mapping X through VFIO is confusing and makes assumptions about how
> > > > userspace configures KVM and VFIO.  It works because QEMU always configures KVM
> > > > and VFIO as expected, but IMO it's unnecessarily fragile and again confusing for
> > > > unaware readers because the code is technically flawed.
> > > >
> > > Agreed. 
> > > Then after some further thought, I think maybe we can just remove
> > > intel_gvt_is_valid_gfn() in KVMGT, because
> > > 
> > > (1) both intel_gvt_is_valid_gfn() in emulate_ggtt_mmio_write() and
> > > ppgtt_populate_spt() are not for page track purpose, but to validate bogus
> > > GFN.
> > > (2) gvt_pin_guest_page() with gfn and size can do the validity checking,
> > > which is called in intel_gvt_dma_map_guest_page(). So, we can move the
> > > mapping of scratch page to the error path after intel_gvt_dma_map_guest_page().
> > 
> > IIUC, that will re-introduce the problem commit cc753fbe1ac4 ("drm/i915/gvt: validate
> > gfn before set shadow page entry") solved by poking into KVM.  Lack of pre-validation
> > means that bogus GFNs will trigger error messages, e.g.
> > 
> > 			gvt_vgpu_err("vfio_pin_pages failed for iova %pad, ret %d\n",
> > 				     &cur_iova, ret);
> > 
> > and
> > 
> > 			gvt_vgpu_err("fail to populate guest ggtt entry\n");
> 
> Thanks for pointing it out.
> I checked this commit message and found below original intentions to introduce
> pre-validation:

...

> (I actually found that the original code will print "invalid entry type"
> warning which indicates it's broken for a while due to lack of test in
> this invalid gfn path)
> 
> 
> > One thought would be to turn those printks into tracepoints to eliminate unwanted
> > noise, and to prevent the guest from spamming the host kernel log by programming
> > garbage into the GTT (gvt_vgpu_err() isn't ratelimited).
> As those printks would not happen in normal conditions and printks may have
> some advantages to discover the attack or bug, could we just convert
> gvt_vgpu_err() to be ratelimited ?

That's ultimately a decision that needs to be made by the GVT maintainers, as the
answer depends on the use case.  E.g. if most users of KVMGT run a single VM and
the guest user is also the host admin, then pr_err_ratelimited() is likely an
acceptable/preferable choice as there's a decent chance a human will see the errors
in the host kernel logs and be able to take action.

But if there's unlikely to be a human monitoring the host logs, and/or the guest
user is unrelated to the host admin, then a ratelimited printk() is less useful.
E.g. if there's no one monitoring the logs, then losing messages due to
ratelimiting provides a worse debug experience overall than having to manually
enable tracepoints.   And if there may be many tens of VMs (seems unlikely?), then
ratelimited printk() is even less useful because errors for a specific VM may be
lost, i.e. the printk() can't be relied upon in any way to detect issues.

FWIW, in KVM proper, use of printk() to capture guest "errors" is strongly discourage
for exactly these reasons.