Re: [Xen-devel] Mem_event API and MEM_EVENT_REASON_SINGLESTEP

[Razvan Cojocaru <rzvncj@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, thank you for the quick reply!
> That might work for single-vcpu guests.  On multi-vcpu, you'd have to
> pause the whole VM, unprotect the page, single-step the one vcpu that
> trapped, re-protect the page, and unpause the VM.  That might be
> unacceptably slow.
Ah, the simple fact that the words "unacceptably slow" could be employed 
to describe the situation makes this approach very unlikely to fit my 
purposes.
I'm still interested in how the debugger API works, though. Maybe, just 
maybe, it'll just be acceptably slow. :)
> You could try:
>   - pause the domain
>   - copy out the contents of the page
>   - use XENMEM_decrease_reservation to remove the page from the guest
>   - unpause the domain
>
> Then all accesses to that page will get emulated by Xen and forwarded to
> qemu, just like happens for emulated MMIO devices.  In qemu, you can
> emulate the read or write access, and do anything else you like at the
> same time.
>
> That won't work for memory that's accessed in non-trivial ways
> (e.g. used for pagetables or descriptor tables) or using instructions
> that are unsupported/buggy in Xen's instruction emulator.
Well, I need it to be able to work on _all_ memory, however accessed. 
Also, with this approach I might have to copy out the contents of all of 
the domain's pages in the worst case scenario - isn't that something to 
avoid?
Thanks,
Razvan Cojocaru

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