On 2020-12-01 5:07 a.m., David Woodhouse wrote:
On Wed, 2019-02-20 at 20:15 +0000, Joao Martins wrote:
+static int kvm_xen_shared_info_init(struct kvm *kvm, gfn_t gfn)
+{
+       struct shared_info *shared_info;
+       struct page *page;
+
+       page = gfn_to_page(kvm, gfn);
+       if (is_error_page(page))
+               return -EINVAL;
+
+       kvm->arch.xen.shinfo_addr = gfn;
+
+       shared_info = page_to_virt(page);
+       memset(shared_info, 0, sizeof(struct shared_info));
+       kvm->arch.xen.shinfo = shared_info;
+       return 0;
+}
+

Hm.

How come we get to pin the page and directly dereference it every time,
while kvm_setup_pvclock_page() has to use kvm_write_guest_cached()
instead?

So looking at my WIP trees from the time, this is something that
we went back and forth on as well with using just a pinned page or a
persistent kvm_vcpu_map().

I remember distinguishing shared_info/vcpu_info from kvm_setup_pvclock_page()
as shared_info is created early and is not expected to change during the
lifetime of the guest which didn't seem true for MSR_KVM_SYSTEM_TIME (or
MSR_KVM_STEAL_TIME) so that would either need to do a kvm_vcpu_map()
kvm_vcpu_unmap() dance or do some kind of synchronization.

That said, I don't think this code explicitly disallows any updates
to shared_info.


If that was allowed, wouldn't it have been a much simpler fix for
CVE-2019-3016? What am I missing?

Agreed.

Perhaps, Paolo can chime in with why KVM never uses pinned page
and always prefers to do cached mappings instead?


Should I rework these to use kvm_write_guest_cached()?

kvm_vcpu_map() would be better. The event channel logic does RMW operations
on shared_info->vcpu_info.


Ankur



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