linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] drivers/virt: vmgenid: add vm generation id driver

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Message-ID: <20201018114625-mutt-send-email-mst@kernel.org>
Date:   Sun, 18 Oct 2020 11:52:06 -0400
From:   "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>
To:     "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@...c4.com>
Cc:     Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>, Willy Tarreau <w@....eu>,
        Colm MacCarthaigh <colmmacc@...zon.com>,
        "Catangiu, Adrian Costin" <acatan@...zon.com>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
        "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>,
        Eric Biggers <ebiggers@...nel.org>,
        "open list:DOCUMENTATION" <linux-doc@...r.kernel.org>,
        kernel list <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        "open list:VIRTIO GPU DRIVER" 
        <virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
        "Graf (AWS), Alexander" <graf@...zon.de>,
        "Woodhouse, David" <dwmw@...zon.co.uk>, bonzini@....org,
        "Singh, Balbir" <sblbir@...zon.com>,
        "Weiss, Radu" <raduweis@...zon.com>, oridgar@...il.com,
        ghammer@...hat.com, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Qemu Developers <qemu-devel@...gnu.org>,
        KVM list <kvm@...r.kernel.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>,
        "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rafael@...nel.org>,
        Pavel Machek <pavel@....cz>,
        Linux API <linux-api@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] drivers/virt: vmgenid: add vm generation id driver

On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 03:24:08PM +0200, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> 4c. The guest kernel maintains an array of physical addresses that are
> MADV_WIPEONFORK. The hypervisor knows about this array and its
> location through whatever protocol, and before resuming a
> moved/snapshotted/duplicated VM, it takes the responsibility for
> memzeroing this memory. The huge pro here would be that this
> eliminates all races, and reduces complexity quite a bit, because the
> hypervisor can perfectly synchronize its bringup (and SMP bringup)
> with this, and it can even optimize things like on-disk memory
> snapshots to simply not write out those pages to disk.
> 
> A 4c-like approach seems like it'd be a lot of bang for the buck -- we
> reuse the existing mechanism (MADV_WIPEONFORK), so there's no new
> userspace API to deal with, and it'd be race free, and eliminate a lot
> of kernel complexity.

Clearly this has a chance to break applications, right?
If there's an app that uses this as a non-system-calls way
to find out whether there was a fork, it will break
when wipe triggers without a fork ...
For example, imagine:

MADV_WIPEONFORK
copy secret data to MADV_DONTFORK
fork


used to work, with this change it gets 0s instead of the secret data.


I am also not sure it's wise to expose each guest process
to the hypervisor like this. E.g. each process needs a
guest physical address of its own then. This is a finite resource.


The mmap interface proposed here is somewhat baroque, but it is
certainly simple to implement ...

-- 
MST