Re: [Qemu-devel] Default for phys-addr-bits? (was Re: [PATCH 4/5] x86: Allow physical address bits to be set)

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 01:23:08AM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 01:44:06AM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 04:24:14PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > > > cause malfunctioning, only crashes (and as Gerd said, if you cross your
> > > > fingers and hope the guest doesn't put anything so high in memory,
> > > > chances are you'll succeed), and this makes it "safer".  I'm not sure
> > > > which one is more likely to happen.
> > > 
> > > But the crash with guest phys bits > host phys bits is material, linux
> > > will definitely crash in such condition.
> > 
> > Why would it? Most GPA addresses are not guest controllable.
> > Don't give guest addresses that host can't access, you will not get
> > a crash.
> > 
> > The only exception I know of is PCI BARs but we can limit
> > these to a safe addressable range using _CRS method in ACPI.
> > 
> > Could you explain please?
> 
> Well the crash of guest phys bits > host phys bits, should be easy to
> reproduce by booting a 65GB guest on a 64GB RAM + 2GB swap host with
> 36 host phys bits using the upstream qemu that forces the guest phys
> bits to 40.

So you supply more RAM than host can address, and guest crashes?

Why are we worried about it?

I would say that's a management bug.


> Likely the guest won't boot properly regardless if the PCI bars are at
> the end, but it may have a chance to print something meaningful on the
> console while trying instead of failing in some unexpected way.
> 
> Now the production patch fixes it 100% by using the host bits instead
> of value 40. However you'd run into the instability if you migrate the
> same guest to the aformentioned host.
> 
> No amount of guest changes can fix the above. So then we can avoid any
> risk of breakages also during live migration introducing a "soft"
> guest phys bits set as low as possible. And live migration restore can
> check it against the host phys bits.

I don't think it's worth fixing. Just don't give more RAM than
host can address.

> The other case (guest phys bits < host phys bits) instead requires a
> guest doing something strange, definitely never going to be a problem
> with linux as guest at least.