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

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Date:   Sun, 18 Oct 2020 08:54:36 -0700
From:   Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>
To:     "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>
Cc:     "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@...c4.com>,
        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 Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 8:52 AM Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@...hat.com> wrote:
>
> 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 ...

Wipe of fork/vmgenid/whatever could end up being much more problematic
than it naively appears -- it could be wiped in the middle of a read.
Either the API needs to handle this cleanly, or we need something more
aggressive like signal-on-fork.

--Andy