Re: [Xen-devel] Xen Advisory 5 (CVE-2011-3131) IOMMU fault livelock

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 12.08.11 at 16:09, Tim Deegan <tim@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> At 14:53 +0100 on 12 Aug (1313160824), Jan Beulich wrote:
>> > This issue is resolved in changeset 23762:537ed3b74b3f of
>> > xen-unstable.hg, and 23112:84e3706df07a of xen-4.1-testing.hg.
>> 
>> Do you really think this helps much? Direct control of the device means
>> it could also (perhaps on a second vCPU) constantly re-enable the bus
>> mastering bit. 
> 
> That path goes through qemu/pciback, so at least lets Xen schedule the
> dom0 tools.

Are you sure? If (as said) the guest uses a second vCPU for doing the
config space accesses, I can't see how this would save the pCPU the
fault storm is occurring on.

> The particular failure that this patch fixes was locking up
> cpu0 so hard that it couldn't even service softirqs, and the NMI
> watchdog rebooted the machine.

Hmm, that would point at a flaw in the interrupt exit path, on which
softirqs shouldn't be ignored.

Jan


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