RE: [Xen-devel] pointers in hcalls

[Reiner Sailer <sailer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2006 13:58:05 +1100
> From: Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [Xen-devel] pointers in hcalls
> To: Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: xen-devel <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Message-ID: <1139281085.13776.29.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> This is a followup to our conversation at the Xen summit about userspace
> passing virtual addresses to the hypervisor.
> 
> We talked about an API where data structures would be allocated from
a
> special area of memory. This API became rather hairy, which we can
talk
> about. However, it seems to me that the simplest way to handle this
is
> to disallow pointers entirely, instead embedding the structures in
the
> higher-level structure. I've had a look through this, and I actually
> don't think that would be too bad.
> 
> When performing this conversion, we could initially exempt the
> arch-specific hcalls. For consistency I think we'd want to do them
all,
> but that's not necessary for correctness. Also, constraining these
> expanded structures to a single page would be best.
> 
> So I had a look through most (all?) of the hcalls in
> xen/include/public/*.h to see which would pose problems. I don't see
any
> show-stoppers:
> - some hcalls, such as dom0_setvcpucontext and dom0_getvcpucontext,
> would be trivial to convert.
> - I haven't looked at the ACM hcalls in detail, but I think they would
> be trivial as well.

The acm hypercalls uses pointers when setting and
reading the policy from the hypervisor and for dumping statistics. A policy
might not necessarily be less than one page.

I don't remember the conversation on the Xen summit
and probably wasn't involved. Would you mind summarizing briefly the discussion?

> - xc_readconsolering() would need to copy up to a page of data into
the
> caller's buffer.
> - it would introduce a hard restriction on the size of the extent
array
> in the memory operations (though it's worth noting that the balloon
> driver already limits this to PAGE_SIZE).
> - dom0_perfccontrol and dom0_getdomaininfolist would gain restrictions
> similar to the memory ops.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> -- 
> Hollis Blanchard
> IBM Linux Technology 

Thanks
Reiner
_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel