Re: [open-vm-tools-devel] FW: Using iopl() in Posix guests

[Anthony L. <an...@co...>]

Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> Adar Dembo wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm playing around with guestd in QEMU and I've noticed that iopl/ioperm
>>
>> aren't used by anything before doing PIO operations.
>>
>> I figure this works in VMware b/c you guys are intercepting the backdoor
>> io port regardless of CPL/IOPL.  While this is useful for OSes like 
>> Windows that have no way to change iopl, it would be nice on Posix 
>> platforms if you did actually use iopl appropriately.
>>
>> It's a whole lot easier to just take a vmexit for PIO than it is to 
>> intercept #gp and try to decode whether it was caused by a ring 3 PIO 
>> instruction.
>>     
>
> Hello Anthony,
>    there are two reasons why we allow backdoor port to be accessed from 
> CPL3:
>
> (1) We want to be able to access it even from non-suid applications - 
> for example copy/paste daemon runs under normal user account, and so it 
> cannot do iopl(3).
>
> (2) When not running in hardware assisted mode binary translation (or 
> simulation) has to be used for CPL3 level code, which causes huge 
> performance impact.
>
> If it is problem for qemu then perhaps creating kernel module to provide 
> access to backdoor is simplest way to address problem, and it will be 
> compatible with all VMware products as well.

Well, long term, I'd like to move to a virtio based socket.  It's hard 
to say how that would intersect with something like VMCI because I don't 
know anything about it :-)  I think in the interim, a simple root daemon 
that allows backdoor operations via a domain socket or something would 
suffice.  Then non root users can still issue backdoor operations but 
the daemon can still use iopl().

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>   Only restriction is that 
> some of our backdoors are accessible to CPL0 code only already, so 
> driver just cannot blindly issue backdoor call with registers it 
> received from userspace, but that should not be complicated thing to 
> address.
>
> For future products we want to use VMCI, which comes with regular kernel 
> driver, and userspace library which can be accessed without IOPL 
> elevation or any tricks in the emulation (well, except that it still 
> does not use regular I/O instructions).  Unfortunately latest released 
> product (WS6) does not provide any interesting service over VMCI, and 
> VMCI even did not make into this opensource release (you can take a look 
> at WS6, but that one is *not* GPLed).
>
> You can add 'monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = "TRUE"' to VM's 
> configuration file when using VMware, and then you should observe 
> exactly same behavior you see with QEMU - guestd and everybody else 
> crashing.
> 					Best regards,
> 						Petr Vandrovec
>
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