[PATCH v2 0/5] KVM: VMX: Fix single stepping with emulated instructions

From: Kyle Huey
Date: Tue Nov 29 2016 - 15:41:07 EST


KVM does not currently honor the trap flag when emulating instructions that
cause VM exits. This is observable from guest userspace, try stepping on a
CPUID instruction in gdb in a KVM guest. The program will stop two
instructions after CPUID.

To fix this, add kvm_skip_emulated_instruction that calls
kvm_x86_ops->skip_emulated_instruction and then kvm_vcpu_check_singlestep to
check for RFLAGS.TF. Patch 4 does this. To handle both the guest setting TF
and the KVM_GUESTDBG_SINGLESTEP cases we need to be able to indicate to
callees that an exit to userspace is required. Patches 1-3 are largely
plumbing to make this possible.

Traps triggered by task switch instructions require some additional handling
and are not implemented. KVM_GUESTDBG_SINGLESTEP traps can be squashed by
certain instructions which also trigger userspace exits, such as HALT,
MOV CR8, and IO instructions. I believe (although I have not tested) that
KVM will simply generate another trap on the next instruction, so this is
no worse than the current behavior.

Patch 5 fixes an existing bug where kvm_vcpu_check_singlestep clears
RFLAGS.TF when generating a singlestep trap. Bare silicon does not do this.

These patches only fix this issue for VMX, and the handful of SVM cases that
call the shared kvm_complete_insn_gp. I don't have AMD silicon to test on.

Since v1:
Patch 3: KVM: VMX: Move skip_emulated_instruction out of nested_vmx_check_vmcs12
- No longer creates a separate skip_emulated_instruction_no_trap variant.

Patch 4: KVM: x86: Add kvm_skip_emulated_instruction and use it.
- Instead the existing skip_emulated_instruction continues to not check the TF
flag.
- kvm_skip_emulated_instruction is added to skip_emulated_instruction and then
deal with any singlestep traps that should be generated.
- The patch 5 from v1 is effectively subsumed by this patch.

Patch 5: KVM: x86: Do not clear RFLAGS.TF when a singlestep trap occurs.
- New in this version, fixes an existing bug visible to the kvm-unit-tests
test I wrote for this patch series.