Re: [Publicity] Draft technical blog post

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2 Oct 2014, at 16:38, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 02, 2014 at 03:48:30PM +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
>> Hey all,
>> 
>> Below is a more technical draft blog post in response to the recent media
>> flurry about XSA-108.  If you've updated your blog logins you can also
>> preview the post here: https://blog.xenproject.org/?p=10093&preview=true
>> 
>> Let me know if you have any feedback!
> 
> You might want to add that Linux guests that run in HVM mode don't enable
> x2APIC mode at all - as they end up using the PVHVM route which ends up
> using events.
> 
> This does affect 'true' HVM guests.

This is pretty confusing -- I've seen quite a few people asking if the
vulnerability affected PVH guests, which is distinct from Linux activating
PV mode when running inside a HVM container, and also distinct from a
Windows HVM guest without PV drivers.

Perhaps throwing a bit more explanation in about the various HVM boot modes
would help allay some of that confusion, or just explicitly having a table
with common guest OSs, what modes they use, and if they're affected or not.
Rackspace, for example, expose this terminology to their users by giving
you the option of booting an Ubuntu PV or PVH guest as separate templates.
I have no idea why they do that since I'm not aware of any application
compatibility that's enabled by running in PVH mode -- it seems like a 
hosting decision rather than one that the user should care about.

-anil


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