Re: [PATCH 0/4] KVM: Honor guest memory types for virtio GPU devices

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Tue, Jan 16, 2024 at 04:05:08AM +0000, Tian, Kevin wrote:
> > From: Tian, Kevin
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2024 8:46 AM
> > 
> > > From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2024 12:31 AM
> > >
> > > On Tue, Jan 09, 2024 at 10:11:23AM +0800, Yan Zhao wrote:
> > >
> > > > > Well, for instance, when you install pages into the KVM the hypervisor
> > > > > will have taken kernel memory, then zero'd it with cachable writes,
> > > > > however the VM can read it incoherently with DMA and access the
> > > > > pre-zero'd data since the zero'd writes potentially hasn't left the
> > > > > cache. That is an information leakage exploit.
> > > >
> > > > This makes sense.
> > > > How about KVM doing cache flush before installing/revoking the
> > > > page if guest memory type is honored?
> > >
> > > I think if you are going to allow the guest to bypass the cache in any
> > > way then KVM should fully flush the cache before allowing the guest to
> > > access memory and it should fully flush the cache after removing
> > > memory from the guest.
> > 
> > For GPU passthrough can we rely on the fact that the entire guest memory
> > is pinned so the only occurrence of removing memory is when killing the
> > guest then the pages will be zero-ed by mm before next use? then we
> > just need to flush the cache before the 1st guest run to avoid information
> > leak.
> 
> Just checked your past comments. If there is no guarantee that the removed
> pages will be zero-ed before next use then yes cache has to be flushed
> after the page is removed from the guest. :/

Next use may include things like swap to disk or live migrate the VM.

So it isn't quite so simple in the general case.

> > > Noting that fully removing the memory now includes VFIO too, which is
> > > going to be very hard to co-ordinate between KVM and VFIO.
> 
> Probably we could just handle cache flush in IOMMUFD or VFIO type1
> map/unmap which is the gate of allowing/denying non-coherent DMAs
> to specific pages.

Maybe, and on live migrate dma stop..

Jason