[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] vhost: fix segfault on bad descriptor address.

Yuanhan Liu yuanhan.liu at linux.intel.com
Wed Jul 13 10:47:32 CEST 2016


On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 10:34:07AM +0300, Ilya Maximets wrote:
> On 12.07.2016 08:53, Ilya Maximets wrote:
> > On 12.07.2016 05:43, Yuanhan Liu wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 02:47:56PM +0300, Ilya Maximets wrote:
> >>> On 11.07.2016 14:05, Yuanhan Liu wrote:
> >>>> On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 12:50:24PM +0300, Ilya Maximets wrote:
> >>>>> On 11.07.2016 11:38, Yuanhan Liu wrote:
> >>>>>> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 09:17:31PM +0800, Yuanhan Liu wrote:
> >>>>>>> On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 02:48:56PM +0300, Ilya Maximets wrote:
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Another point is that crash constantly happens on queue_id=3 (second RX queue) in
> >>>>>>>> my scenario. It is newly allocated virtqueue while reconfiguration from rxq=1 to
> >>>>>>>> rxq=2.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> That's a valuable message: what's your DPDK HEAD commit while triggering
> >>>>>>> this issue?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> fbfd99551ca3 ("mbuf: add raw allocation function")
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I guess I have understood what goes wrong in you case.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I would guess that your vhost has 2 queues (here I mean queue-pairs,
> >>>>>> including one Tx and Rx queue; below usage is the same) configured,
> >>>>>> so does to your QEMU. However, you just enabled 1 queue while starting
> >>>>>> testpmd inside the guest, and you want to enable 2 queues by running
> >>>>>> following testpmd commands:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>     stop
> >>>>>>     port stop all
> >>>>>>     port config all rxq 2
> >>>>>>     port config all txq 2
> >>>>>>     port start all
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Badly, that won't work for current virtio PMD implementation, and what's
> >>>>>> worse, it triggers a vhost crash, the one you saw.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Here is how it comes. Since you just enabled 1 queue while starting
> >>>>>> testpmd, it will setup 1 queue only, meaning only one queue's **valid**
> >>>>>> information will be sent to vhost. You might see SET_VRING_ADDR
> >>>>>> (and related vhost messages) for the other queue as well, but they
> >>>>>> are just the dummy messages: they don't include any valid/real
> >>>>>> information about the 2nd queue: the driver don't setup it after all.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> So far, so good. It became broken when you run above commands. Those
> >>>>>> commands do setup for the 2nd queue, however, they failed to trigger
> >>>>>> the QEMU virtio device to start the vhost-user negotiation, meaning
> >>>>>> no SET_VRING_ADDR will be sent for the 2nd queue, leaving vhost
> >>>>>> untold and not updated.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> What's worse, above commands trigger the QEMU to send SET_VRING_ENABLE
> >>>>>> messages, to enable all the vrings. And since the vrings for the 2nd
> >>>>>> queue are not properly configured, the crash happens.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Hmm, why 2nd queue works properly with my fix to vhost in this case?
> >>>>
> >>>> Hmm, really? You are sure that data flows in your 2nd queue after those
> >>>> commands? From what I know is that your patch just avoid a crash, but
> >>>> does not fix it.
> >>>
> >>> Oh, sorry. Yes, it doesn't work. With my patch applied I have a QEMU hang.
> >>
> >> The crash actually could be avoided by commit 0823c1cb0a73 ("vhost:
> >> workaround stale vring base"), accidentally. That's why I asked you
> >> above the HEAD commit you were using.
> > 
> > Thanks for pointing this. I'll check it.
> 
> I've checked my DPDK HEAD with above commit backported. Yes, it helps to
> avoid vhost crash in my scenario. As expected, after reconfiguration new
> virtqueue doesn't work, QEMU hangs sometimes.
> >>>>>> So maybe we should do virtio reset on port start?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I guess it was removed by this patch:
> >>>>> a85786dc816f ("virtio: fix states handling during initialization").
> >>>>
> >>>> Seems yes.
> >>
> >> Actually, we should not do that: do reset on port start. The right fix
> >> should be allocating MAX queues virtio device supports (2 here). This
> >> would allow us changing the queue number dynamically.
> > 
> > Yes, I agree that this is the right way to fix this issue.
> >  
> >> But this doesn't sound a simple fix; it involves many code changes, due
> >> to it was not designed this way before. Therefore, we will not fix it
> >> in this release, due to it's too late. Let's fix it in the next release
> >> instead. For the crash issue, it will not happen with the latest HEAD.
> >> Though it's accident fix, I think we are fine here.
> 
> This scenario fixed somehow, I agree. But this patch still needed to protect
> vhost from untrusted VM, from malicious or buggy virtio application.
> Maybe we could change the commit-message and resend this patch as a
> security enhancement? What do you think?

Indeed, but I'm a bit concerned about the performance regression found
by Rich, yet I am not quite sure why it happens, though Rich claimed
that it seems to be a problem related to compiler.

	--yliu


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