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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v6 2/4] x86/hvm: Treat non-instruction fetch nested page faults also as read violations



On 08/15/2014 11:29 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 15.08.14 at 17:09, <boris.ostrovsky@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 08/15/2014 11:01 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 15.08.14 at 16:31, <boris.ostrovsky@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 08/14/2014 06:59 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
No - the hardware specifically does _not_ guarantee to report the
actual characteristics of a read-modify-write instruction. Or at least
that's what your documentation warns about. And to be on the safe
side, treating all writes as also being reads is the better option than
to mistakenly treat r-m-w as just w.
Is this specific to VMX or does SVM have the same problem (I am not
aware of this but I might be wrong). Because if it doesn't then I think
Tamas' [PATCH v6 2/4] should have SVM report actual bits.
You as the SVM maintainer should know better than me... With
NPT using "normal" page fault error codes, there is not even an
indication for read access. Tamas's patches adjust the current
misbehavior too in that at least instruction fetches no longer get
reported as reads.
What I am asking is whether

     .read_access = !(pfec & (PFEC_insn_fetch | PFEC_write_access))

would be more appropriate.
Ah, no, clearly not: Again - read-modify-write instructions _have_
to be reported as being reads and writes. Reporting simply writes
as reads too is the smaller of the two "evils" here. If anything we
could introduce a "maybe-read" flag that gets set when don't know
for sure.

I think an explicit comment in VMX and SVM code explaining why the bits are set the way they are may be sufficient (I know this is mentioned in the commit message but having it in the code is better IMO).

-boris

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