Re: [Xen-devel] read-only pagetable entries

[Srujan Kotikela <ksrujandas@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:27 AM, Tim Deegan <Tim.Deegan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

At 21:29 -0500 on 19 Jun (1308518969), Srujan Kotikela wrote:
> I am trying to mark certain page-table entries (pte) of a guest as read-only
> by the guest operating system (complete control by xen). If this pte is
> ever to be changed to READ/WRITE, it should be done by  a custom hypercall
> (called only by a special process). The guest os's request to mark this pte
> READ/WRITE should be denied/ignored by xen.
>
> The approach I am planning is, obtain the (guest) virtual address from the
> process and pass to xen through hypercall, obtain cr3 from the vcpu, compute
> PDE (page directory entry), obtain PT (Page Table) base address, compute
> PTE's (guest) physical address. Then translate PFN to MFN and update the
> entries to READ-ONLY.
>
> However, I feel this process is not sufficient to restrict the OS from
> changing it.

It's certainly not enough to stop the OS from changing it by itself.
You'd need to make that PTE read-only _and_ make all mappings of the PTE
itself read-only _and_ make sure there are no new r/w mappings of it.

I think the right thing to do is to translate the VA you start with into
a PFN and then just call p2m_change_type to mark that PFN read-only.
That way, the PTE the guest sees will still be r/w but all writes to the
address will be dropped.  (That assumes this is a HVM guest, by the
way).

Cheers,

Tim.

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

   Hi,

   I am trying to see the working of "p2m_change_type". For this I am 
passing the PFN of a variable (computed using 
virt_to_pfn(&variable)) in a kernel module. Then this PFN is being 
passed to VMM through a hypercall (from a HVM guest). In the hypercall handler, I have the 
following code (where PFN == GFN) :

>    struct vcpu *v = current; 
>    struct domain *d = v->domain;
>   
>     p2m_type_t ot;
>     mfn_t mfn;
>    
>     mfn = gfn_to_mfn(d, gfn , &ot);        //find the old type of the gfn
>     printk("MFN  : %lx\n", mfn);
>     printk("OT   : %d\n", ot);
>     
>     p2m_change_type(d, gfn, ot, p2m_ram_ro);

   After this I tried to assign a new value to variable (to test if the 
write request is being dropped).  But, the DomU hangs within the kernel 
module (insmod      command is never being completed).

   I assume this is because I am doing it within a kernel module. Now I 
am going to try passing a user process' variable's address to kernel 
module and pass it further to hypervisor  and repeat the above process. 
Before that, I just want to make sure that I am going in the right 
direction. 
   
  Thanks,
   _SDK
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