Re: [Xen-devel] Xen kexec status

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 27/04/2019 07:15, David Woodhouse wrote:
> I've been looking at kexec into Xen, and from Xen.
>
> Kexec-tools doesn't support Multiboot v2, and doesn't treat the Xen
> image as relocatable. So it loads it at address zero, which causes lots
> of amusement:

Which binary are you trying to load?

xen-syms gets converted into an elf32 which should be linked to run a
2M.  See mkelf32 and XEN_IMG_OFFSET

> Firstly, head.S trusts the low memory limit found in the BDA, which has
> been scribbled on. Hacking around that and setting no-real-mode does
> make kexec into Xen from Linux work.

Do we know what scribbles on it?

For better or worse, the IVT needs to remain valid wherever possible to
reduce the number of corner cases where an errant NMI/#MC will take out
the entire system.

> Secondly, kexec (in xen_kexec_load()) adds a mapping of the 0-1MiB
> region, which "overlaps" with where Xen is actually loaded, so *Xen*
> refuses the kexec_load hypercall.

ISTR this being necessary for purgatory to function at the time David
did the kexec work, but really it seems like a bug with the
configuration of purgatory.

> For kexec from Xen I also reverted to kexec-tools 2.0.16 as commit
> 894bea9335f57b62c ("kexec-tools: Perform run-time linking of
> libxenctrl.so") seems to have broken things by not always defining
> HAVE_LIBXENCTRL when it should. I'll fix that shortly.
>
> Most of the above is relatively simply worked around by hacking the Xen
> image to be ET_DYN (so that kexec will relocate it) and then using
> kexec --mem-min=0x100000. I'll probably implement Multiboot v2 support
> in kexec-tools to allow for saner relocation.

I think having MB2 support would be a very good move.  It also provides
a better way to pass the UEFI details.

> We should fix head.S. One option is to recognise when the load address
> is zero, and automatically eschew the BDA and trigger the no-real-mode
> behaviour when that is the case. Better suggestions welcome.
>
> Should we also avoid having a load segment at offset zero in the image,
> so that it doesn't scribble on the BDA by default?

I don't think we should ever be loading a binary at 0, but it might be
worth having a dedicated kexec entry point which can be more selective
about what it does.

The EFI and PVH entrypoints already set skip_realmode amongst other things.

Another option might be to only use the BDA/EBDA in the absence of any
memory map information.

> Should we also fix Xen's kexec_load not to refuse overlapping segments
> if they are not loaded (bufsz==0)? I'm not quite sure what's going on
> there; doesn't this happen with paging disabled anyway, so why would we
> need an explicit mapping of RAM?

Do you have a dump of which segments are attempting to be loaded?  TBH,
this sounds like fallout from the earlier issues, but it is also
possible that we've got a bug in the overlap checks.

> After that, I'm looking at using Xen as a crash kernel, which means I
> really don't want it scribbling on low memory that it hasn't been
> explicitly told it can use. First attempt at this is at 
> http://david.woodhou.se/0001-x86-boot-Use-trampoline_protmode_entry-in-place.patch
> but as noted there, it only works for a single processor for now; I'll
> fix it as described therein.

I think it is well past time to (re)consider and strip down the early
assembly code.  There are a number of at-best-questionable things, and
it is extremely thick going.  (TBH, I'd also like to replace most of it
with C, but doing that will first require understanding how it actually
all works.)

Currently, the main Xen image strictly needs to be located below the 4G
boundary, so you are right that none of the 32bit code actually needs to
be in the trampoline.  In principle it would be nice to lift this
restriction, at which point we need all the code required to get into
long mode in the trampoline.

~Andrew

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