Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v5 20/22] xen/arm: ITS: Map ITS translation space

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2015-08-18 at 23:37 +0100, Marc Zyngier wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Aug 2015 20:14:43 +0100 Julien Grall <julien.grall@xxxxxxxxxx> 
> wrote:
> 
> > Marc pointed me today that if the processor is writing into 
> > GITS_TRANSLATER it may be able to deadlock the system.
> > 
> > Reading more closely the spec (8.1.3 IHI0069A), there is undefined 
> > behavior when writing to this register with wrong access size.
> > 
> > Currently the page table are shared between the processor and the SMMU, 
> > 
> > so that means that a domain will be able to deadlock the processor and 
> > therefore the whole platform.
> 
> Indeed. A CPU should *never* be able to write to the GITS_TRANSLATER
> register. What would be the meaning anyway? How would a DeviceID be
> sampled? This is definitely UNPREDICTIBLE territory, and you want to
> make sure a guest cannot directly write to the HW.
> 
> > So we should never expose GITS_TRANSLATER into the processor page 
> > table. 
> > Which means unsharing some parts if not all of the page tables between 
> > the processor and the SMMU.
> 
> Agreed. It looks to me like the CPU should only see the the virtual
> ITS, and nothing else.

It's rather unfortunate that using an ITS therefore precludes sharing stage
-2 page tables between MMU and SMMU, which it seems otherwise the
architecture designers have tried hard to allow.

Do you know if this will be fixed in some future revision (although given
we now need to have the functionality anyway I'm not sure it help more than
 saving a few pages of memory :-()

Ian.

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