WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-devel

Re: [Xen-devel] pciback: question about the permissive flag

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 04:05:44PM +0200, Joanna Rutkowska wrote:
> On 07/07/10 15:30, Ian Pratt wrote:
> >> I think the fear was that there could be class- or device-specific
> >> config registers that we wouldn't know how to handle, and which
> >> could have unexpected effects if they are passed through naively.
> >> Concrete examples were never given, and this was all pre-vtd so as
> >> you say pass-through of a DMA-capable device was insecure anyway.
> >> I've always thought the permissive flag stuff was pretty useless,
> >> and I always suggest people to enable the permissive flag.
> > 
> > There are some devices (typically integrated ones, e.g. igfx) that
> > use PCI config space in nasty ways, such as to describe additional
> > BARs, or to trigger SMIs. Allowing free access to these seems
> > dangerous.
> > 
> 
> So, you're saying that, if we have a device that allows us to set some
> of its PCI config register (some BAR) to tell where to MMIO-map some of
> the device's additional config range, and if we "asked it" to map it
> over, say, some physical addresses belonging to the hypervisor, then the
> MCH would allow for that? And the CPU would happily redirect access to
> those addresses over to the device memory? Why would it? That would

I would think the VT-d chipset would throw a fit.
> clearly be a CPU/chipset bug, as we normally would have to mark this
> memory range as MMIOed in the first place...
> 
> And even if we wanted to instruct the device to map its memory over some
> already MMIOed memory in a hypervisor, shouldn't VT-d prevent the
> read/write transactions going to this device?

That is my feeling too.
> 
> As for the SMI generation: that stinks indeed. But, does it offer any
> control over the generated #SMI, e.g. what we write into the 0xb2 port,
> or something like that? If it doesn, then surely it's an avenue for
> DomU->SMM escalation, which would mean full system compromise.
> 
> I'm trying to figure out why so many drivers do not work well when run
> in a PV driver domain (specifically net drivers), but work fine when
> running in Dom0. Clearly this is not a pfn != mfn problem, as this
> inequality also applies to Dom0, while in Dom0 the same drivers work
> just fine. So it seems like it could only be caused by either of the
> following:
> 1) restricted access to device config space

You can track those easily. Turn on xen-pciback.verbose=1 and you should
see the writes/reads and see if there are any that touch on the
restricted areas.

> 2) interrupt routing problem

Well, that can easily be seen by the /proc/interrupts. If the numbers
are increasing the interrupts are getting there.

Thought if this is MSI/MSI-X make sure you have the latest pv-ops
kernel. There were some bugs I introduced earlier on so that turning on
MSI/MSI-X interrupts would trash the guest. That has been fixed
nowadays.

> 
> Or maybe something else?

If you crank up the debug options something should show up. Especially
if you have the IOMMU turned on.

Are these wireless drivers?

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