Re: [PATCH] arm: Don't remove EL3 exposure for SMC conduit

[Peter Maydell]

On Sun, 14 Nov 2021 at 10:56, Alexander Graf <agraf@csgraf.de> wrote:
>
> When we expose an SMC conduit, we're implicitly telling the guest that
> there is EL3 available because it needs to call it. While that EL3 then
> is not backed by the emulated CPU, from the guest's EL2 point of view,
> it still means there is an EL3 to call into.
>
> This is a problem for VMware ESXi, which validates EL3 availability before
> doing SMC calls. With this patch, VMware ESXi works with SMP in TCG.
>
> Reported-by: Andrei Warkentin <andrey.warkentin@gmail.com>
> Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <agraf@csgraf.de>
> ---
>  target/arm/cpu.c | 20 +++++++++++++++-----
>  1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/target/arm/cpu.c b/target/arm/cpu.c
> index a211804fd3..21092c5242 100644
> --- a/target/arm/cpu.c
> +++ b/target/arm/cpu.c
> @@ -1782,11 +1782,21 @@ static void arm_cpu_realizefn(DeviceState *dev, Error 
> **errp)
>           */
>          unset_feature(env, ARM_FEATURE_EL3);
>
> -        /* Disable the security extension feature bits in the processor 
> feature
> -         * registers as well. These are id_pfr1[7:4] and id_aa64pfr0[15:12].
> -         */
> -        cpu->isar.id_pfr1 &= ~0xf0;
> -        cpu->isar.id_aa64pfr0 &= ~0xf000;
> +        if (cpu->psci_conduit == QEMU_PSCI_CONDUIT_SMC) {
> +            /*
> +             * We tell the guest to use SMC calls into EL3 for PSCI calls, so
> +             * there has to be EL3 available. We merely execute it on the 
> host
> +             * in QEMU rather than in actual EL3 inside the guest.
> +             */
> +        } else {
> +            /*
> +             * Disable the security extension feature bits in the processor
> +             * feature registers as well. These are id_pfr1[7:4] and
> +             * id_aa64pfr0[15:12].
> +             */
> +            cpu->isar.id_pfr1 &= ~0xf0;
> +            cpu->isar.id_aa64pfr0 &= ~0xf000;
> +        }

This is tricky, because we use the cpu->isar values to determine whether
we should be emulating things. So this change means we now create an
inconsistent CPU which in some ways claims to have EL3 (the ISAR ID
bits say so) and in some ways does not (the ARM_FEATURE_EL3 flag is
unset), and depending on which of the two "do we have EL3?" methods
any bit of the TCG code is using will give different results...

-- PMM