Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86: enable TDP MMU by default

From: Maxim Levitsky
Date: Wed Jul 27 2022 - 06:23:04 EST


On Tue, 2022-07-26 at 17:43 +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 7/26/22 16:57, Stoiko Ivanov wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Proxmox[0] recently switched to the 5.15 kernel series (based on the one
> > for Ubuntu 22.04), which includes this commit.
> > While it's working well on most installations, we have a few users who
> > reported that some of their guests shutdown with
> > `KVM: entry failed, hardware error 0x80000021` being logged under certain
> > conditions and environments[1]:
> > * The issue is not deterministically reproducible, and only happens
> > eventually with certain loads (e.g. we have only one system in our
> > office which exhibits the issue - and this only by repeatedly installing
> > Windows 2k22 ~ one out of 10 installs will cause the guest-crash)
> > * While most reports are referring to (newer) Windows guests, some users
> > run into the issue with Linux VMs as well
> > * The affected systems are from a quite wide range - our affected machine
> > is an old IvyBridge Xeon with outdated BIOS (an equivalent system with
> > the latest available BIOS is not affected), but we have
> > reports of all kind of Intel CPUs (up to an i5-12400). It seems AMD CPUs
> > are not affected.
> >
> > Disabling tdp_mmu seems to mitigate the issue, but I still thought you
> > might want to know that in some cases tdp_mmu causes problems, or that you
> > even might have an idea of how to fix the issue without explicitly
> > disabling tdp_mmu?
>
> If you don't need secure boot, you can try disabling SMM. It should not
> be related to TDP MMU, but the logs (thanks!) point at an SMM entry (RIP
> = 0x8000, CS base=0x7ffc2000).

No doubt about it. It is the issue.

>
> This is likely to be fixed by
> https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20220621150902.46126-1-mlevitsk@xxxxxxxxxx/.


Speaking of my patch series, anything I should do to move that thing forward?

My approach to preserve the interrupt shadow in SMRAM doesn't seem to be accepted,
so what you think I should do?

Best regards,
Maxim Levitsky

>
> Paolo
>