On 13 Nov 2021, at 19:19, Jorge Pereira 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Ok, is there any rationale for not allowing the guest to directly invoke the 
secure world? This is a hardware feature supported by ARMv8 and I was wondering 
that unnecessary traps will just bring more performance overhead. Is there any 
security concern?

The discussion hasn't really concluded on that yet, but the concern is that 
guest VM's  in terms of security are untrusted code that must be presumed 
malicious, so they cannot be granted uncontrolled access to arbitrary 
high-privilege code (just because that code tends to be vendor-provided does 
not mean it is of high quality or trustworthy). This means the general 
mechanism should be conservative.

We could think about exceptions, but that should only be done once we know 
there is an actual performance problem. Otherwise that would be a premature 
optimisation. So far it looks like those calls are infrequent and mostly needed 
at boot time.

Cheers,
Gerwin

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