[Xen-devel] Is exposing shared_info to user-land secure?

["Dan Magenheimer" <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Is it "safe" in a paravirtualized guest to expose shared_info
(at least read-only) to user-land?  That is, is there data
in shared_info that could be used by a malicious program to
compromise a guest OS (ignoring very complex side-channel
attacks anyway)?

We have apps that constantly do various time syscalls (e.g.
to gettimeofday()) and I'm thinking if vcpu_info(cpu)->time_info
was directly readable by an enterprise app, it could do
the time calculations itself and save the syscall overhead.

Comments?

Thanks,
Dan

===================================
Thanks... for the memory
I really could use more / My throughput's on the floor
The balloon is flat / My swap disk's fat / I've OOM's in store
Overcommitted so much
(with apologies to the late great Bob Hope)

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