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

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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
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16
qemu-options.hx
View file

@ -4995,7 +4995,7 @@ SRST
they are specified. Note that the 'id' property must be set. These
objects are placed in the '/objects' path.
``-object memory-backend-file,id=id,size=size,mem-path=dir,share=on|off,discard-data=on|off,merge=on|off,dump=on|off,prealloc=on|off,host-nodes=host-nodes,policy=default|preferred|bind|interleave,align=align,offset=offset,readonly=on|off``
``-object memory-backend-file,id=id,size=size,mem-path=dir,share=on|off,discard-data=on|off,merge=on|off,dump=on|off,prealloc=on|off,host-nodes=host-nodes,policy=default|preferred|bind|interleave,align=align,offset=offset,readonly=on|off,rom=on|off|auto``
Creates a memory file backend object, which can be used to back
the guest RAM with huge pages.
@ -5085,6 +5085,20 @@ SRST
The ``readonly`` option specifies whether the backing file is opened
read-only or read-write (default).
The ``rom`` option specifies 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 proper 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`` (default), the value of the
``readonly`` option is used. This option is primarily helpful when
we want to have writable RAM in configurations that would
traditionally create ROM before the ``rom`` option was introduced:
VM templating, where we want to open a file readonly
(``readonly=on``) and mark the memory to be private for QEMU
(``share=off``). For this use case, we need writable RAM instead
of ROM, and want to also set ``rom=off``.
``-object memory-backend-ram,id=id,merge=on|off,dump=on|off,share=on|off,prealloc=on|off,size=size,host-nodes=host-nodes,policy=default|preferred|bind|interleave``
Creates a memory backend object, which can be used to back the
guest RAM. Memory backend objects offer more control than the