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Subject: Re: [virtio-dev] Re: Vhost-pci RFC2.0
On 04/19/2017 06:36 PM, Jan Kiszka wrote:
On 2017-04-19 12:02, Wei Wang wrote:The design presented here intends to use only one BAR to expose both TX and RX. The two VMs share an intermediate memory here, why couldn't we give the same permission to TX and RX?For security and/or safety reasons: the TX side can then safely prepare and sign a message in-place because the RX side cannot mess around with it while not yet being signed (or check-summed). Saves one copy from a secure place into the shared memory.If we allow guest1 to write to RX, what safety issue would it cause to guest2?This way, guest1 could trick guest2, in a race condition, to sign a modified message instead of the original one.Just align the context that we are talking about: RX is the intermediate shared ring that guest1 uses to receive packets and guest2 uses to send packet. Seems the issue is that guest1 will receive a hacked message from RX (modified by itself). How would it affect guest2?Retry: guest2 wants to send a signed/hashed message to guest1. For that purpose, it starts to build that message inside the shared memory that guest1 can at least read, then guest2 signs that message, also in-place. If guest1 can modify the message inside the ring while guest2 has not yet signed it, the result is invalid. Now, if guest2 is the final receiver of the message, nothing is lost, guest2 just shot itself into the foot. However, if guest2 is just a router (gray channel) and the message travels further, guest2 now has corrupted that channel without allowing the final receive to detect that. That's the scenario.
If guest2 has been a malicious guest, I think it wouldn't make a difference whether we protect the shared RX or not. As a router, guest2 can play tricks on the messages after read it and then send the modified message to a third man, right?
Fig. 4 shows the inter-VM notification path for 2.0 (2.1 is similar). The four eventfds are allocated by virtio-net, and shared with vhost-pci-net: Uses virtio-net’s TX/RX kickfd as the vhost-pci-net’s RX/TX callfd Uses virtio-net’s TX/RX callfd as the vhost-pci-net’s RX/TX kickfd Example of how it works: After packets are put into vhost-pci-net’s TX, the driver kicks TX, which causes the an interrupt associated with fd3 to be injected to virtio-net The draft code of the 2.0 design is ready, and can be found here: Qemu: _https://github.com/wei-w-wang/vhost-pci-device_ Guest driver: _https://github.com/wei-w-wang/vhost-pci-driver_ We tested the 2.0 implementation using the Spirent packet generator to transmit 64B packets, the results show that the throughput of vhost-pci reaches around 1.8Mpps, which is around two times larger than the legacy OVS+DPDK. Also, vhost-pci shows better scalability than OVS+DPDK.Do you have numbers for the symmetric 2.1 case as well? Or is the driver not yet ready for that yet? Otherwise, I could try to make it work over a simplistic vhost-pci 2.1 version in Jailhouse as well. That would give a better picture of how much additional complexity this would mean compared to our ivshmem 2.0.Implementation of 2.1 is not ready yet. We can extend it to 2.1 after the common driver frame is reviewed.Can you you assess the needed effort? For us, this is a critical feature, because we need to decide if vhost-pci can be an option at all. In fact, the "exotic ring" will be the only way to provide secure inter-partition communication on Jailhouse.If what is here for 2.0 is suitable to be upstream-ed, I think it will be easy to extend it to 2.1 (probably within 1 month).Unfortunate ordering here, though. Specifically if we need to modify existing things instead of just adding something. We will need 2.1 prior to committing to 2.0 being the right thing.If you want, we can get the common part of design ready first, then we can start to build on the common part at the same time. The draft code of 2.0 is ready. I can clean it up, making it easier for us to continue and change.Without going into details yet, a meta requirement for us will be to have advanced features optional, negotiable. Basically, we would like to minimize the interface to an equivalent of what the ivshmem 2.0 is about (there is no need for more in a safe/secure partitioning scenario). At the same time, the complexity for a guest should remain low as well. From past experience, the only way to ensure that is having a working prototype. So I will have to look into enabling that.
OK. Looks like the ordering needs to be changed. This doesn't appear to be a problem to me. If the final design doesn't deviate a lot from what's presented here, I think it should be easy to get 2.1 implemented quickly. Let's first get the design ready, then assess the effort for implementation. Best, Wei
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