backends/hostmem-file: Add "rom" property to support VM templating with R/O files

For now, "share=off,readonly=on" would always result in us opening the
file R/O and mmap'ing the opened file MAP_PRIVATE R/O -- effectively
turning it into ROM.

Especially for VM templating, "share=off" is a common use case. However,
that use case is impossible with files that lack write permissions,
because "share=off,readonly=on" will not give us writable RAM.

The sole user of ROM via memory-backend-file are R/O NVDIMMs, but as we
have users (Kata Containers) that rely on the existing behavior --
malicious VMs should not be able to consume COW memory for R/O NVDIMMs --
we cannot change the semantics of "share=off,readonly=on"

So let's add a new "rom" property with on/off/auto values. "auto" is
the default and what most people will use: for historical reasons, to not
change the old semantics, it defaults to the value of the "readonly"
property.

For VM templating, one can now use:
    -object memory-backend-file,share=off,readonly=on,rom=off,...

But we'll disallow:
    -object memory-backend-file,share=on,readonly=on,rom=off,...
because we would otherwise get an error when trying to mmap the R/O file
shared and writable. An explicit error message is cleaner.

We will also disallow for now:
    -object memory-backend-file,share=off,readonly=off,rom=on,...
    -object memory-backend-file,share=on,readonly=off,rom=on,...
It's not harmful, but also not really required for now.

Alternatives that were abandoned:
* Make "unarmed=on" for the NVDIMM set the memory region container
  readonly. We would still see a change of ROM->RAM and possibly run
  into memslot limits with vhost-user. Further, there might be use cases
  for "unarmed=on" that should still allow writing to that memory
  (temporary files, system RAM, ...).
* Add a new "readonly=on/off/auto" parameter for NVDIMMs. Similar issues
  as with "unarmed=on".
* Make "readonly" consume "on/off/file" instead of being a 'bool' type.
  This would slightly changes the behavior of the "readonly" parameter:
  values like true/false (as accepted by a 'bool'type) would no longer be
  accepted.

Message-ID: <20230906120503.359863-4-david@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
This commit is contained in:
David Hildenbrand 2023-09-06 14:04:55 +02:00
parent 5c52a219bb
commit e92666b0ba
3 changed files with 89 additions and 3 deletions

View file

@ -668,6 +668,20 @@
# @readonly: if true, the backing file is opened read-only; if false,
# it is opened read-write. (default: false)
#
# @rom: whether to create Read Only Memory (ROM) that cannot be modified
# by the VM. Any write attempts to such ROM will be denied. Most
# use cases want writable RAM instead of ROM. However, selected use
# cases, like R/O NVDIMMs, can benefit from ROM. If set to 'on',
# create ROM; if set to 'off', create writable RAM; if set to
# 'auto', the value of the @readonly property is used. This
# property is primarily helpful when we want to have proper RAM in
# configurations that would traditionally create ROM before this
# property was introduced: VM templating, where we want to open a
# file readonly (@readonly set to true) and mark the memory to be
# private for QEMU (@share set to false). For this use case, we need
# writable RAM instead of ROM, and want to set this property to 'off'.
# (default: auto, since 8.2)
#
# Since: 2.1
##
{ 'struct': 'MemoryBackendFileProperties',
@ -677,7 +691,8 @@
'*discard-data': 'bool',
'mem-path': 'str',
'*pmem': { 'type': 'bool', 'if': 'CONFIG_LIBPMEM' },
'*readonly': 'bool' } }
'*readonly': 'bool',
'*rom': 'OnOffAuto' } }
##
# @MemoryBackendMemfdProperties: