[Xen-devel] [PATCH 00/22] Vixen: A PV-in-HVM shim

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxx>]

From: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxxxx>

CVE-2017-5754 is problematic for paravirtualized x86 domUs because it
appears to be very difficult to isolate the hypervisor's page tables
from PV domUs while maintaining ABI compatibility.  Instead of trying
to make a KPTI-like approach work for Xen PV, it seems reasonable to
run a copy of Xen within an HVM (or PVH) domU to provide backwards
compatibility with guests as mentioned in XSA-254 [1].

This patch series adds a new mode to Xen called Vixen (Virtualized
Xen) which provides a PV-compatible interface while gaining
CVE-2017-5754 protection for the host provided by hardware
virtualization.  Vixen supports running a single unprivileged PV
domain (a dom1) that is constructed by the dom0 domain builder.

Please note the Xen page table configuration fundamental to the
current PV ABI makes it impossible for an operating system to mitigate
CVE-2017-5754 through mechanisms like Kernel Page Table Isolation
(KPTI).  In order for an operating system to mitigate CVE-2017-5754 it
must run directly in a HVM or PVH domU.

This series is very similar to the PVH series posted by Wei and we
have been discussing how to merge efforts.  We were hoping to have
more time to work this out.  I am posting this because I'm fairly
confident that this series is complete (all PV instances in EC2 are
using this) and others might find it useful.  I also wanted to have
more of a discussion about the best way to merge and some of the
differences in designs.

This series is also available at:

 git clone https://github.com/aliguori/xen.git vixen-upstream-v1

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

[1] https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-254.html

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