[Xen-devel] shadow2 corrupting PV guest state

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>]

I've been fighting random crashes in the paravirt tree for a while.  
After a fair amount of head-banging, it  looks to me like the shadow2 
code is trashing the guest stack (and maybe register state) at random 
points.
If I boot a kernel with CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC enabled (which 
dramatically increases the rate of pagetable modifications), it rarely 
makes it through early boot without some random crash.  The crashes are 
often at the same place, but they move around; however they tend to be 
near places where the pagetable is touched.  It may also interact with 
timer events; certainly masking events seems to help a bit.
I tend to see this a lot more when running under qemu, but I've also 
seen strange things happen on real hardware. 

If I roll Xen back to pre-shadow2 (change fda70200da01), all these 
mysterious crashes disappear. 

Looking into it a bit more deeply, the kind of crash I'm seeing are 
along the lines of:
   mov (%ebx), %eax       # works; %ebx is a valid pointer
   call xen_enable_irq
   mov %eax, (%ebx)   # crashes; %ebx will equal 0, 1, or something bad


where xen_enable_irq will have pushed %ebx, set the flag state, polled 
for pending events and popped %ebx.  My suspicion is that something 
about re-enabling interrupts is causing the on-stack version of %ebx to 
get trashed, rather than the actual %ebx register state (in general the 
corrupted register is the one near or at the top of the stack).  
Sometimes the corruption shows up as %eip off in the weeds (either at 
NULL-ish addresses, or executing the stack).
I'm speculating that the sequence is:

  1. change pagetable; this creates a deferred pagetable update
  2. enable events
  3. handle pending timer interrupt, which also does a deferred
     pagetable update
  4. resume running with corrupted stack

But I don't really know enough about how shadow2 works to know if that's 
really plausible.  Maybe a vcpu/guest context switch is a part of the 
sequence.  

I wonder if the stack corruption is caused by a mismatch of exception 
frame formats between exception->iret?
All a bit handwavy, but I haven't really managed to make much headway.  
I spent some time assuming it was a bug on my side, but the fact that 
all these symptoms go away with pre-shadow2 Xen makes me point the 
finger over the wall.
Or perhaps it really is just a qemu bug, but I can't imagine that 
shadow2 exercises qemu's emulated CPU exception stuff in a way which 
normal Xen doesn't...  I think its more likely that there's some race 
which is much more easily triggered by qemu's slow speed.
Any thoughts or ideas?

   J

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