Re: [Xen-devel] stale TLB contents?

[Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 13:00 +0000 on 24 Jan (1295874058), Juergen Gross wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> in our BS2000 guest running as HVM with EPT on x86_64 I have a problem which
> seems to be related to stale TLB entries. I'm pretty sure I have invalidated
> the TLB correctly after a change of the page tables, so I've searched for
> possible problems in the hypervisor.
> 
> Xen is version 4.0 from SLES 11 SP1.
> 
> If I have read the sources correctly, neither INVLPG nor reload of CR3 are
> handled by the hypervisor. And I didn't find an explicit clearing of the TLB
> when a vcpu is switching physical cpus. So I think the following scenario is
> possible:
> 
> - a vcpu is running on physical cpu A creating a TLB entry
> - the vcpu is scheduled on physical cpu B, while physical cpu A is left idle
> - on physical cpu B the TLB entry is cleared by INVLPG or load CR3
> - the vcpu is scheduled on physical cpu A again (no other vcpu was active
>    there in between), CR3 is same as when vcpu left cpu A
> - the old TLB entry from the vcpu is still valid there!
> 
> Do I miss something?

vmx_do_resume() calls hvm_asid_flush_vcpu() if the VCPU is migrating
onto this CPU, so the VCPU should get a fresh ASID when it comes back to
CPU A.  Processors with no ASID support flush their TLBs on every
VMENTER and VMEXIT, so I don't see where we could leak TLB entries.

If there is a leak it should be fairly easy to repro with a toy kernel
and an idle host.

Cheers,

Tim

-- 
Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx>
Principal Software Engineer, Xen Platform Team
Citrix Systems UK Ltd.  (Company #02937203, SL9 0BG)

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