linux-kernel - Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/4] x86/entry: disallow #DB more

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Date:   Fri, 22 May 2020 15:43:35 -0700
From:   Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
To:     Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@...el.com>
Cc:     Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, X86 ML <x86@...nel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/4] x86/entry: disallow #DB more


> On May 22, 2020, at 3:20 PM, Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@...el.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 03:13:57PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 1:49 PM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hai, this kills #DB during NMI/#MC and with that allows removing all the nasty
>>> IST rewrite crud.
>>> 
>> 
>> This is great, except that the unconditional DR7 write is going to
>> seriously hurt perf performance.  Fortunately, no one cares about
>> perf, right? :)  Even just reading first won't help enough because DR7
>> reads are likely to be VM exits.  Can we have a percpu dr7 shadow
>> (with careful ordering) or even just a percpu count of dr7 users so we
>> can skip this if there are no breakpoints?
> 
> Hmm, I believe hw_breakpoint_active() is what you're looking for, KVM uses
> it to avoid unnecessary restoration of host DR7 after VM-Exit.
> 
> Amusingly, checking that in the NMI handler could give a false positive if
> an NMI occurs in guest as DR7 is cleared on exit and KVM invokes the NMI
> handler prior to restoring host DR7.  I doubt that's common enough to care
> about though.

False positives are unavoidable: there’s no way we can set a percpu variable and set DR7 without risking an NMI in between.