Re: [PATCH 3/5] lguest: avoid accidental recycling of pgdir pages

From: Rusty Russell
Date: Thu Mar 26 2009 - 21:24:43 EST


On Friday 27 March 2009 10:47:32 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Rusty Russell wrote:
> > Impact: potential bugfix
> >
> > In theory, the kernel could reuse the same page as pgdir for a new process
> > while the hypervisor keeps it cached. This would have undesirable results.
> >
>
> You can't just do this in tlb flush?

I don't think so. The problem is that lguest tracks 4 toplevels, using random
replacement. This cache is indexed by cr3 value.

Lguest assumes it's told about all pte removals or changes, but simple
additions get faulted in. If a pgdir page gets reused we'll potentially have
stale values from its previous life as a pgdir, no?

Now, I haven't *seen* this happen...
Rusty.
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