Re: [Xen-devel] Hypercall Inquiries

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/05/17 15:22, Rapidash wrote:
> Greetings,
>  My co-worker and I are looking into Xen Hypervisor. By any chance, do
> you or any of your colleagues have technical material/ papers/
> presentations detailing how the hypercall interacts with the hypervisor?

xen/include/public/arch-x86/xen-x86_{32,64}.h document the ABI.

There are some books on Xen, but there isn't a written technical
specification (as far as I am aware).

>
>  Thank you in advance for any assistance,
>   - Rapidash
>
>
> Some specific questions:
> - If the memory of the VM is stored on non-congruent sections of the
> host's machine memory, how does the hypercall handler check whether a
> passed in pointer parameter falls within these VM claimed sections of
> memory?

You look like you are considering PV guests?

If so, realise that PV guests running under Xen are just like userspace
processes running under an native kernel.  There is a shared virtual
address space, and the system call interface uses plain pointers.

> - Since the hypercalls are limited in number compared to syscalls, is
> there ever an instance where the domain will require a syscall that
> the hypercall does not cover?

I don't understand the what you mean.  "hypercalls" are just system
calls from the guest kernel to Xen.  They are entirely orthogonal to the
guests userspace issuing system calls to its kernel.

>  
> Also, we have been looking at the Xen hypercall source code to try and
> figure out the mechanics there. In file "hypercall-x86_64.h" there is
> the following code segment we are attempting to decipher (from it, we
> can figure out the preceding functions):
>
> #define _hypercall5(type, name, a1, a2, a3, a4, a5)  \
> ({        \
>  long __res, __ign1, __ign2, __ign3;   \
>  asm volatile (      \
>   "movq %7,%%r10; movq %8,%%r8; "   \
>   "call hypercall_page + ("STR(__HYPERVISOR_##name)" * 32)"\
>   : "=a" (__res), "=D" (__ign1), "=S" (__ign2), \
>   "=d" (__ign3)     \
>   : "1" ((long)(a1)), "2" ((long)(a2)),  \
>   "3" ((long)(a3)), "g" ((long)(a4)),  \
>   "g" ((long)(a5))    \
>   : "memory", "r10", "r8" );   \
>  (type)__res;      \
> })

This is a rather poor piece of code, but I am afraid that my best advice
here is to read the GCC documentation on how the asm() statement.  None
of these questions are xen-specific, but the chances are good that you
wont understand my answers if you don't understand how extended assembly
works.

>
> - The first line within the asm volatile section, are the contents of
> registers being saved to memory? If so, where?

No.  AT&T syntax reads left to right, so the destination operands are on
the right hand side.  In this case, the %r10 and %r8 registers.

> - In the third and fourth lines within the same section, are values
> from __res being placed into the "a" register, or are the values
> within the "a" register being stored in the variable __res for use later?

"=a" is an output, meaning that %rax gets stored into __res.

> - Does the "1", "2", "3", "g", "g" correspond to the ebx, ecx, edx,
> esi, and edi registers? Or are they a different set?

The numbers match up to the output operands, so are %rdi, %rsi, %rdx in
that order.

The g constraint means any general purpose register.

~Andrew

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