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xen-devel
Re: [Xen-devel] Logging External Page Writes for a Given Domain
 
Scott Baker wrote:
 
Anthony,
 Thanks for your response!  I've been thinking more about exactly what 
the requirements are, and it amounts to the following.
 The end goal is to know the net result of any foreign-domain page 
writes to all of a domain's (call it Domain P) pages.  I don't 
actually need to know the contents of every individual foreign write 
to Domain P's pages per se, just which the contents of the pages that 
were modified by foreign domains since Domain P was last run.
 Let me give an example to illustrate.  Domain P is running.  It is 
then suspended to allow another domain, Domain X, to start execution.  
Domain X happens to have a few pages of Domain P mapped into its 
address space.  (This may be due to a device driver's page mapping 
from Domain 0, or just another Domain mapping -- I don't care why the 
pages are mapped).  Now, during its time slice, Domain X modifies 
(over a period of several writes) two of Domain P's pages: page 19 and 
94.  Then, Domain X is suspended and Domain Y is run.  Domain Y also 
modifies Domain P's page 94.  Finally, Domain Y is suspended so Domain 
P can resume.  It is at this point, *just before Domain P resumes*, 
that I would like to be able to have a list of the pages (if any) that 
have been written by a foreign domain (94 and 19, in this example).  
With that list, I would like to log the *entire contents* of those 
modified pages of Domain P for my later use -- I don't need to know 
who wrote what when, just which pages were modified so I can log their 
new contents.
 Are you ignoring the SMP case (where two domains may be executing 
simultaneously)?  If so, I think the most direct approach would be to 
enable the dirty page tracking in shadow paging mode, and then dump any 
share pages before world switching that are dirty.  It still requires 
hypervisor modification, but it's reasonably straight forward.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
 So, in essence, *just before* every time that Domain P is allowed to 
resume, I want to have a list of pages that have been modified *since 
Domain P finished its previous time slice*, for the purpose of logging 
the contents of each of those changed pages.
 Having said all that, what is the most straightforward way to 
implement this (it needn't be the most efficient, though gross 
inefficiency would be nice to avoid)?
I really appreciate the feedback I've received.
Thanks again,
Scott
Anthony Liguori wrote:
 
Scott Baker wrote:
 
Hello, all:
 My team's goal is to be able to log all writes that are made to any 
memory page of a certain domain, except those writes that the domain 
itself makes.  That is to say, if Domain 2 is the domain we want to 
log page writes for (where logging is capturing what was written and 
its location), then we want to be able to log all the writes made by 
any domain /except/ Domain 2 -- i.e., writes made to shared pages 
that belong to Domain 2.
 The details here are going to make a big difference.  Do you want to 
know the content of every write?
 You'll have to modify Xen.  You can probably reuse some of the shadow 
paging code to track the dirty mappings of foreign pages for a 
domain.  However, this won't track the contents of the write.
 If you want to do that, you're going to have to implement a large 
amount of emulation to track what data gets written to the page so 
you can emulate the writes completely.  If this is an important 
requirement, you may wish to try to user an emulator (Bochs or qemu).
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
 
 Ideally, we would like to be able to have these writes for domain 
/x/ detected and trap to a process running on Domain 0, with minimal 
VMM modification.  Preferably, the method used would only cause 
significant overhead when a write is made from outside domain /x/ 
(rather than for every write /x/ and everyone else makes), but I'm 
not picky about efficiency at the moment.
 The rough idea we have at this point is to make the monitor process 
on Domain 0 mark all the pages of Domain /x/ as read-only (while 
remembering which are actually read-only).  Then, when a write-fault 
occurred, the VMM would pass it on to the monitoring process, which 
would then let Domain /x/ finish the write, the monitor would record 
what was written, and let everything continue as normal.
 Unfortunately, I'm not sure how that vague sketch fits into Xen.  
For the page table read-only flag setting, would we use the 
update_va_mapping() hypercall?  And, how would the monitoring 
process let Domain /x/ finish the write and then get control back?  
(Or, does the VMM know what is about to be written, so we could just 
pass that to the monitoring process?)  Finally, where in Xen's code 
would we have to go to modify the fault-handling behavior so the 
callback could be made?
Hope I'm clear, and hope you can help a newbie!
Thanks,
Scott
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