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Re: [XEN v3] xen/arm64: io: Decode ldr/str post-indexing instructions



Hi Andre,

On 24/01/2022 14:36, Andre Przywara wrote:
On Mon, 24 Jan 2022 12:07:42 +0000
Also, if an instruction is being modified by the guest (after it has
been loaded in the I cache), and if the guest does not invalidate the I
cache + ISB, then this is a malicious behavior by the guest. Is my
understanding correct ?

I wouldn't say malicious per se, there might be legitimate reasons to do
so, but in the Xen context this is mostly irrelevant, since we don't trust
the guest anyway. So whether it's malicious or accidental, the hypervisor
might be mislead.

I agree the hypervisor will be mislead to execute the wrong instruction. But, in reality, I don't see how this is a massive problem as this thread seems to imply. At best the guest will shoot itself in the foot.

IOW, for now, I think it is fine to assume that the guest will have invalidated the cache instruction before executing any instruction that may fault with ISV=0. This could be revisted if we have use-cases where we really need to know what the guest executed.

Cheers,

--
Julien Grall



 


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