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To:     Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
Cc:     Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com>,
        Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@tencent.com>,
        Jim Mattson <jmattson@google.com>,
        Joerg Roedel <joro@8bytes.org>, kvm@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Yu Zhang <yu.c.zhang@linux.intel.com>,
        Maxim Levitsky <mlevitsk@redhat.com>
References: <20210622175739.3610207-1-seanjc@google.com>
 <20210622175739.3610207-10-seanjc@google.com>
From:   Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 09/54] KVM: x86/mmu: Unconditionally zap unsync SPs when
 creating >4k SP at GFN
Message-ID: <f2dcfe12-e562-754e-2756-1414e8e2775f@redhat.com>
Date:   Wed, 23 Jun 2021 16:36:50 +0200
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On 22/06/21 19:56, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> When creating a new upper-level shadow page, zap unsync shadow pages at
> the same target gfn instead of attempting to sync the pages.  This fixes
> a bug where an unsync shadow page could be sync'd with an incompatible
> context, e.g. wrong smm, is_guest, etc... flags.  In practice, the bug is
> relatively benign as sync_page() is all but guaranteed to fail its check
> that the guest's desired gfn (for the to-be-sync'd page) matches the
> current gfn associated with the shadow page.  I.e. kvm_sync_page() would
> end up zapping the page anyways.
> 
> Alternatively, __kvm_sync_page() could be modified to explicitly verify
> the mmu_role of the unsync shadow page is compatible with the current MMU
> context.  But, except for this specific case, __kvm_sync_page() is called
> iff the page is compatible, e.g. the transient sync in kvm_mmu_get_page()
> requires an exact role match, and the call from kvm_sync_mmu_roots() is
> only synchronizing shadow pages from the current MMU (which better be
> compatible or KVM has problems).  And as described above, attempting to
> sync shadow pages when creating an upper-level shadow page is unlikely
> to succeed, e.g. zero successful syncs were observed when running Linux
> guests despite over a million attempts.

One issue, this WARN_ON may now trigger:

                         WARN_ON(!list_empty(&invalid_list));

due to a kvm_mmu_prepare_zap_page that could have happened on an earlier 
iteration of the for_each_valid_sp.  Before your change, __kvm_sync_page 
would be called always before kvm_sync_pages could add anything to 
invalid_list.

Paolo