Linux kernel source tree
86eb1aef72
As part of enabling TDX virtual machines, support support separation of
private/shared EPT into separate roots.
Confidential computing solutions almost invariably have concepts of
private and shared memory, but they may different a lot in the details.
In SEV, for example, the bit is handled more like a permission bit as
far as the page tables are concerned: the private/shared bit is not
included in the physical address.
For TDX, instead, the bit is more like a physical address bit, with
the host mapping private memory in one half of the address space and
shared in another. Furthermore, the two halves are mapped by different
EPT roots and only the shared half is managed by KVM; the private half
(also called Secure EPT in Intel documentation) gets managed by the
privileged TDX Module via SEAMCALLs.
As a result, the operations that actually change the private half of
the EPT are limited and relatively slow compared to reading a PTE. For
this reason the design for KVM is to keep a mirror of the private EPT in
host memory. This allows KVM to quickly walk the EPT and only perform the
slower private EPT operations when it needs to actually modify mid-level
private PTEs.
There are thus three sets of EPT page tables: external, mirror and
direct. In the case of TDX (the only user of this framework) the
first two cover private memory, whereas the third manages shared
memory:
external EPT - Hidden within the TDX module, modified via TDX module
calls.
mirror EPT - Bookkeeping tree used as an optimization by KVM, not
used by the processor.
direct EPT - Normal EPT that maps unencrypted shared memory.
Managed like the EPT of a normal VM.
Modifying external EPT
----------------------
Modifications to the mirrored page tables need to also perform the
same operations to the private page tables, which will be handled via
kvm_x86_ops. Although this prep series does not interact with the TDX
module at all to actually configure the private EPT, it does lay the
ground work for doing this.
In some ways updating the private EPT is as simple as plumbing PTE
modifications through to also call into the TDX module; however, the
locking is more complicated because inserting a single PTE cannot anymore
be done atomically with a single CMPXCHG. For this reason, the existing
FROZEN_SPTE mechanism is used whenever a call to the TDX module updates the
private EPT. FROZEN_SPTE acts basically as a spinlock on a PTE. Besides
protecting operation of KVM, it limits the set of cases in which the
TDX module will encounter contention on its own PTE locks.
Zapping external EPT
--------------------
While the framework tries to be relatively generic, and to be
understandable without knowing TDX much in detail, some requirements of
TDX sometimes leak; for example the private page tables also cannot be
zapped while the range has anything mapped, so the mirrored/private page
tables need to be protected from KVM operations that zap any non-leaf
PTEs, for example kvm_mmu_reset_context() or kvm_mmu_zap_all_fast().
For normal VMs, guest memory is zapped for several reasons: user
memory getting paged out by the guest, memslots getting deleted,
passthrough of devices with non-coherent DMA. Confidential computing
adds to these the conversion of memory between shared and privates. These
operations must not zap any private memory that is in use by the guest.
This is possible because the only zapping that is out of the control
of KVM/userspace is paging out userspace memory, which cannot apply to
guestmemfd operations. Thus a TDX VM will only zap private memory from
memslot deletion and from conversion between private and shared memory
which is triggered by the guest.
To avoid zapping too much memory, enums are introduced so that operations
can choose to target only private or shared memory, and thus only
direct or mirror EPT. For example:
Memslot deletion - Private and shared
MMU notifier based zapping - Shared only
Conversion to shared - Private only
Conversion to private - Shared only
Other cases of zapping will not be supported for KVM, for example
APICv update or non-coherent DMA status update; for the latter, TDX will
simply require that the CPU supports self-snoop and honor guest PAT
unconditionally for shared memory.
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Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.