Re: [PATCH v1] driver: base: Add driver filter support

From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Wed Aug 04 2021 - 17:07:56 EST


On Wed, Aug 04, 2021 at 01:11:27PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 12:29 PM Greg Kroah-Hartman
> <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Why not just make distros that want to support this type of platform,
> > also provide these tiny kernel images? Why are you pushing this work on
> > the kernel community instead?
>
> In fact, these questions are where I started when first encountering
> this proposal. Andi has addressed the single kernel image constraint,
> but I want to pick up on this "pushing work to the kernel community"
> contention. The small list of vetted drivers that a TDX guest needs
> will be built-in and maintained in the kernel by the protected guest
> developer community, so no "pushing work" there. However, given that
> any driver disable mechanism needs to touch the driver core I
> advocated to go ahead and make this a general purpose capability to
> pick up where this [1] conversation left off. I.e. a general facility
> for the corner cases that modprobe and kernel config policy can not
> reach. Corner cases like VMM attacking the VM, or broken hardware with
> a built-in driver that can't be unbound after the fact.

I don't understand how this defends against a hypervisor attacking a
guest. If the hardware exists, the hypervisor can access it, regardless
of whether the driver is default-disabled by configuration.