On 01.12.22 20:25, Julien Grall wrote:
Hi Juergen,

On 08/11/2022 08:09, Juergen Gross wrote:
On 07.11.22 19:37, Julien Grall wrote:
On 07/11/2022 08:34, Juergen Gross wrote:
On 06.11.22 23:00, Julien Grall wrote:
Hi Juergen,

On 01/11/2022 15:28, Juergen Gross wrote:
The accounting for the number of nodes of a domain in an active
transaction is not working correctly, as it allows to create arbitrary
number of nodes. The transaction will finally fail due to exceeding
the number of nodes quota, but before closing the transaction an
unprivileged guest could cause Xenstore to use a lot of memory.

I have already made some of comments on the security ML when this was initially set. The arguments still don't sound right to me.

For a first, since XSA-326, we have a cap in place for the memory a domain can consume. So this surely can't be a "lot of memory". Otherwise we are saying that our limit (there are other way to hit it) were wrong...

Yeah, maybe I should rework the commit message.

The reason I still want to keep the patch is that in a transaction without any
conflicts and without hitting any transaction specific limits (number of nodes
accessed), the errors returned due to a single operation should be the same as
with the same operation performed outside a transaction.

This seems to be a very niche use case. So it is not clear to me why this matter and we want to add extra check for everyone.

It is a matter of correctness.

I think this is a matter of perspective. Transactions are inherently racy and I see no point of try to solve issues in the idealistic case (i.e. no conflict).
The reasoning below...


Additionally, after the internal accounting rework this makes even more
sense, as the maximum values per domain seen are really correct, even when
queried while transactions are active.
... might be a better justification. But I will need to review the other patch in order to forge a more positive opinion. Can you point me to the patch?

The main changes are in patches 2-4 of the 2nd series [1].


Juergen

[1]: https://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2022-11/msg00050.html

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