Re: [PATCH RFC v2 0/2] arm: enable MTE for QEMU + kvm

[Cornelia Huck]

On Mon, Jul 11 2022, "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com> wrote:

> * Peter Maydell (peter.maydell@linaro.org) wrote:
>> On Mon, 11 Jul 2022 at 14:24, Dr. David Alan Gilbert
>> <dgilbert@redhat.com> wrote:
>> > But, ignoring postcopy for a minute, with KVM how do different types of
>> > backing memory work - e.g. if I back a region of guest memory with
>> > /dev/shm/something or a hugepage equivalent, where does the MTE memory
>> > come from, and how do you set it?
>> 
>> Generally in an MTE system anything that's "plain old RAM" is expected
>> to support tags. (The architecture manual calls this "conventional
>> memory". This isn't quite the same as "anything that looks RAM-like",
>> e.g. the graphics card framebuffer doesn't have to support tags!)
>
> I guess things like non-volatile disks mapped as DAX are fun edge cases.
>
>> One plausible implementation is that the firmware and memory controller
>> are in cahoots and arrange that the appropriate fraction of the DRAM is
>> reserved for holding tags (and inaccessible as normal RAM even by the OS);
>> but where the tags are stored is entirely impdef and an implementation
>> could choose to put the tags in their own entirely separate storage if
>> it liked. The only way to access the tag storage is via the instructions
>> for getting and setting tags.
>
> Hmm OK;   In postcopy, at the moment, the call qemu uses is a call that
> atomically places a page of data in memory and then tells the vCPUs to
> continue.  I guess a variant that took an extra blob of MTE data would
> do.

Yes, the current idea is to extend UFFDIO_COPY with a flag so that we
get the tag data along with the page.

> Note that other VMMs built on kvm work in different ways; the other
> common way is to write into the backing file (i.e. the /dev/shm
> whatever atomically somehow) and then do the userfault call to tell the
> vcpus to continue.  It looks like this is the way things will work in
> the split hugepage mechanism Google are currently adding.

Hmm... I had the impression that other VMMs had not cared about this
particular use case yet; if they need a slightly different mechanism,
it would complicate things a bit.