Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2024 14:53:28 -0800
From: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@...gle.com>
To: Mingwei Zhang <mizhang@...gle.com>
Cc: Dongli Zhang <dongli.zhang@...cle.com>, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>, 
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, kvm@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86/pmu: Fix type length error when reading pmu->fixed_ctr_ctrl

On Thu, Feb 01, 2024, Mingwei Zhang wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 11:36 AM Sean Christopherson <seanjc@...gle.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 01, 2024, Mingwei Zhang wrote:
> > > On Thu, Feb 01, 2024, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Jan 31, 2024, Mingwei Zhang wrote:
> > > > > > The PMC is still active while the VM side handle_pmi_common() is not going to handle it?
> > > > >
> > > > > hmm, so the new value is '0', but the old value is non-zero, KVM is
> > > > > supposed to zero out (stop) the fix counter), but it skips it. This
> > > > > leads to the counter continuously increasing until it overflows, but
> > > > > guest PMU thought it had disabled it. That's why you got this warning?
> > > >
> > > > No, that can't happen, and KVM would have a massive bug if that were the case.
> > > > The truncation can _only_ cause bits to disappear, it can't magically make bits
> > > > appear, i.e. the _only_ way this can cause a problem is for KVM to incorrectly
> > > > think a PMC is being disabled.
> > >
> > > The reason why the bug does not happen is because there is global
> > > control. So disabling a counter will be effectively done in the global
> > > disable part, ie., when guest PMU writes to MSR 0x38f.
> >
> >
> > > > fixed PMC is disabled. KVM will pause the counter in reprogram_counter(), and
> > > > then leave the perf event paused counter as pmc_event_is_allowed() will return
> > > > %false due to the PMC being locally disabled.
> > > >
> > > > But in this case, _if_ the counter is actually enabled, KVM will simply reprogram
> > > > the PMC.  Reprogramming is unnecessary and wasteful, but it's not broken.
> > >
> > > no, if the counter is actually enabled, but then it is assigned to
> > > old_fixed_ctr_ctrl, the value is truncated. When control goes to the
> > > check at the time of disabling the counter, KVM thinks it is disabled,
> > > since the value is already truncated to 0. So KVM will skip by saying
> > > "oh, the counter is already disabled, why reprogram? No need!".
> >
> > Ooh, I had them backwards.  KVM can miss 1=>0, but not 0=>1.  I'll apply this
> > for 6.8; does this changelog work for you?
> >
> >   Use a u64 instead of a u8 when taking a snapshot of pmu->fixed_ctr_ctrl
> >   when reprogramming fixed counters, as truncating the value results in KVM
> >   thinking all fixed counters, except counter 0, are already disabled.  As
> >   a result, if the guest disables a fixed counter, KVM will get a false
> >   negative and fail to reprogram/disable emulation of the counter, which can
> >   leads to spurious PMIs in the guest.
> 
> That works for me. Maybe scoping that to the guest VMs with PerfMon v1 enabled?

No, because from a purely architectural perspective, the bug isn't limited to
VMs without PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL.  Linux may always clear the associated enable bit
in PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL, but that's not a hard requirement, a guest could choose to
always leave bits set in PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL and instead use IA32_FIXED_CTR_CTRL to
toggle PMCs on and off.

  Each enable bit in MSR_PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL is AND’ed with the enable bits for all
  privilege levels in the respective IA32_PERFEVTSELx or IA32_FIXED_CTR_CTRL MSRs
  to start/stop the counting of respective counters. Counting is enabled if the
  AND’ed results is true; counting is disabled when the result is false.

I'm not saying that such guests are likely to show up in the wild, but I don't
want to make any assumptions about what the guest does or does not do when it
comes to making statements about the impact of bugs.

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