Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/4] Add support for execution from ROMs in IO device mode

[Jan Kiszka]

Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Jan Kiszka wrote:
>> While IO_MEM_ROMD marks an I/O memory region as "read/execute from RAM,
>> but write to I/O handler", there is no flag indicating that an I/O
>> region which is fully managed by I/O handlers can still be hosting
>> executable code. One use case for this are flash device models that
>> switch to I/O mode during reprogramming. Not all reprogramming states
>> modify to read data, thus practically allow to continue execution.
>> Moreover, we need to avoid switching the modes too frequently for
>> performance reasons which requires fetching opcodes while still in I/O
>> device mode.
> 
> I like this change.
> 
> Does "fetching opcodes while still in I/O device mode" fetch opcodes
> from the RAM backing, or via the I/O read handlers?

Via the latter. This is most "correct" in that broken guests that jump
to the ROM while it's in some critical write cycle will properly crash.

> 
> If the latter, I'm wondering how KVM would cope with that.

I think it won't work without extending KVM to fetch - as a last resort
- also from I/O devices. Or we give up the "correctness" and keep the
RAM-base KVM slot for IO_MEM_EXEC regions. That should be solvable in a
transparent way in kvm_set_phys_mem.

Jan

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