[Xen-devel] [PATCH v2] x86/altp2m: Allow setting the #VE info page for an arbitrary VCPU

[Adrian Pop <apop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In a classic HVI + Xen setup, the introspection engine would monitor
legacy guest page-tables by marking them read-only inside the EPT; this
way any modification explicitly made by the guest or implicitly made by
the CPU page walker would trigger an EPT violation, which would be
forwarded by Xen to the SVA and thus the HVI agent.  The HVI agent would
analyse the modification, and act upon it - for example, a virtual page
may be remapped (its guest physical address changed inside the
page-table), in which case the introspection logic would update the
protection accordingly (remove EPT hook on the old gpa, and place a new
EPT hook on the new gpa).  In other cases, the modification may be of no
interest to the introspection engine - for example, the accessed/dirty
bits may be cleared by the operating system or the accessed/dirty bits
may be set by the CPU page walker.

In our tests we discovered that the vast majority of guest page-table
modifications fall in the second category (especially on Windows 10 RS4
x64 - more than 95% of ALL the page-table modifications are irrelevant to
us) - they are of no interest to the introspection logic, but they
trigger a very costly EPT violation nonetheless.  Therefore, we decided
to make use of the new #VE & VMFUNC features in recent Intel CPUs to
accelerate the guest page-tables monitoring in the following way:

1. Each monitored page-table would be flagged as being convertible
   inside the EPT, thus enabling the CPU to deliver a virtualization
   exception to he guest instead of generating a traditional EPT
   violation.
2. We inject a small filtering driver inside the protected guest VM,
   which would intercept the virtualization exception in order to handle
   guest page-table modifications.
3. We create a dedicated EPT view (altp2m) for the in-guest agent, which
   would isolate the agent from the rest of the operating system; the
   agent will switch in and out of the protected EPT view via the VMFUNC
   instruction placed inside a trampoline page, thus making the agent
   immune to malicious code inside the guest.

This way, all the page-table accesses would generate a
virtualization-exception inside the guest instead of a costly EPT
violation; the #VE agent would emulate and analyse the modification, and
decide whether it is relevant for the main introspection logic; if it is
relevant, it would do a VMCALL and notify the introspection engine
about the modification; otherwise, it would resume normal instruction
execution, thus avoiding a very costly VM exit.

Signed-off-by: Adrian Pop <apop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
Changes in v2:
- remove the "__get_vcpu()" helper
---
 tools/libxc/xc_altp2m.c |  1 -
 xen/arch/x86/hvm/hvm.c  | 19 ++++++++++---------
 2 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)

diff --git a/tools/libxc/xc_altp2m.c b/tools/libxc/xc_altp2m.c
index ce4a1e4d60..528e929d7a 100644
--- a/tools/libxc/xc_altp2m.c
+++ b/tools/libxc/xc_altp2m.c
@@ -68,7 +68,6 @@ int xc_altp2m_set_domain_state(xc_interface *handle, uint32_t 
dom, bool state)
     return rc;
 }
 
-/* This is a bit odd to me that it acts on current.. */
 int xc_altp2m_set_vcpu_enable_notify(xc_interface *handle, uint32_t domid,
                                      uint32_t vcpuid, xen_pfn_t gfn)
 {
diff --git a/xen/arch/x86/hvm/hvm.c b/xen/arch/x86/hvm/hvm.c
index 72c51faecb..49c3bbee94 100644
--- a/xen/arch/x86/hvm/hvm.c
+++ b/xen/arch/x86/hvm/hvm.c
@@ -4533,8 +4533,7 @@ static int do_altp2m_op(
         return -EOPNOTSUPP;
     }
 
-    d = ( a.cmd != HVMOP_altp2m_vcpu_enable_notify ) ?
-        rcu_lock_domain_by_any_id(a.domain) : rcu_lock_current_domain();
+    d = rcu_lock_domain_by_any_id(a.domain);
 
     if ( d == NULL )
         return -ESRCH;
@@ -4605,26 +4604,28 @@ static int do_altp2m_op(
 
     case HVMOP_altp2m_vcpu_enable_notify:
     {
-        struct vcpu *curr = current;
+        struct vcpu *v;
         p2m_type_t p2mt;
 
-        if ( a.u.enable_notify.pad || a.domain != DOMID_SELF ||
-             a.u.enable_notify.vcpu_id != curr->vcpu_id )
+        if ( a.u.enable_notify.pad ||
+             a.u.enable_notify.vcpu_id >= d->max_vcpus )
         {
             rc = -EINVAL;
             break;
         }
 
-        if ( !gfn_eq(vcpu_altp2m(curr).veinfo_gfn, INVALID_GFN) ||
-             mfn_eq(get_gfn_query_unlocked(curr->domain,
+        v = d->vcpu[a.u.enable_notify.vcpu_id];
+
+        if ( !gfn_eq(vcpu_altp2m(v).veinfo_gfn, INVALID_GFN) ||
+             mfn_eq(get_gfn_query_unlocked(v->domain,
                     a.u.enable_notify.gfn, &p2mt), INVALID_MFN) )
         {
             rc = -EINVAL;
             break;
         }
 
-        vcpu_altp2m(curr).veinfo_gfn = _gfn(a.u.enable_notify.gfn);
-        altp2m_vcpu_update_vmfunc_ve(curr);
+        vcpu_altp2m(v).veinfo_gfn = _gfn(a.u.enable_notify.gfn);
+        altp2m_vcpu_update_vmfunc_ve(v);
         break;
     }
 
-- 
2.18.0


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