Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v6 2/4] x86/hvm: Treat non-instruction fetch nested page faults also as read violations

[Tamas K Lengyel <tamas.lengyel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 6:48 PM, Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>>> On 15.08.14 at 18:33, <tamas.lengyel@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>  Ah, no, clearly not: Again - read-modify-write instructions _have_
>>> to be reported as being reads and writes. Reporting simply writes
>>> as reads too is the smaller of the two "evils" here. If anything we
>>> could introduce a "maybe-read" flag that gets set when don't know
>>> for sure.
>>>
>>
>> I think an explicit comment in VMX and SVM code explaining why the bits
>> are set the way they are may be sufficient (I know this is mentioned in the
>> commit message but having it in the code is better IMO).
>

> I can certainly do that if the consensus is to include the patch.

The patch is a necessary prerequisite for the patch that I sent you
earlier (which I'll rebase on top of yours as soon as yours reached a
state that can go in - which, afaic, is already the case), so it will
have to go in (as said in another reply, in the worst case with a
maybe-read flag instead of the current solution, but personally I
don't see a point to distinguish the two cases until a consumer
appears that can't tolerate plain writes to also be marked as being
reads).

Jan

I think the best comment for the VMX side is to just actually copy-paste the warning from the Intel manual (which sounds actually a lot more severe, since it isn't even consistent in marking r-m-w instructions as w only):

/* We treat all write violations also as read violations.

* The reason why this is required is the following warning:

* "An EPT violation that occurs during as a result of execution of a

* read-modify-write operation sets bit 1 (data write). Whether it also

* sets bit 0 (data read) is implementation-specific and, for a given

* implementation, may differ for different kinds of read-modify-write

* operations."

* - Intel(R) 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual

* Volume 3C: System Programming Guide, Part 3 */

As for the SVM side, I'm thinking something along these lines:

/* We distinguis between data read-access violations

* and instruction fetch violations here, albeit the fact

* that the hardware doesn't explicitely differentiate them.

* This is required in order to provide appropriate abstraction

* of vendor-specific NPT implementations. */

Tamas

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